Wow two posts a day for a while. Guess a lot has been on my mind. A lot of it is just blathering… but I hope that some of it makes people think. Even if their thoughts have to do with the strange twisted person sitting on the other side of this keyboard.
My previous post was actually supposed to be about how people live in the US and avoid feeling responsible for the terrible poverty all around them, the homeless, the brilliant children who can’t think in school because they haven’t eaten for a couple days or maybe their brother just got shot in a gang war, the women struggling to raise children by themselves and provide good homes for them, work, and make sure that they do their homework, not to mention maybe get to play and cuddle a little. That was where the whole “dreamed reality” thing was coming in and then I totally went off in another direction. But I come back to it now.
People who are in middle income brackets, who own homes, go to work each day, do their duty of Sunday church without examining their thoughts or feelings, are the sheep I refer to. They blindly do whatever it is they are taught is supposed to be done. This goes across all societal income levels I know but I pick on the middle class because it is comfortable enough to live, yet sees no bounty in what it has.
The upper class people that I have met, at least those in New Orleans, (I didn’t know any in politics so I don’t know about them), they were taught from the cradle to have a responsibility to do good with their money. No that doesn’t mean they didn’t sneer at the poor, or feel that it was somehow their fault, or close their eyes or turn their heads at the beggar on the street. But it does mean that to some extent, they were taught that as a part of their priviledge they had a “noblesse oblige” to do good work.
I worked at the most prestigous prep school in New Orleans for a while. All of the very priviledged kids went there. And there were two lessons about money I took away. The first was that their families did take it very seriously. One particular money family (there were several cousins of this family in the school) made each child responsible for some project in which they were expected to oversee and participate each week. It was a big responsibility, and taken very seriously.
The second was that money wasn’t any cure for unhappiness. Of the two families I’m talking about, there were two brothers decended from the line. Both had married women from old money families. And both married women had jumped off the Huey P Long within a few years of each other leaving their children and lives behind. Sort of like Princess Diana, although not really, unless they’d been pushed.
Of course, that didn’t stop these high school kids from being the Paris Hilton type either. One day a girl sat at my lunch table and complained about the Bugatti her father had given her for her birthday. Don’t know what that is? Neither did I. I went home and asked my husband. Here one is.
But the upper class does seem to feel that there is something important about trying to improve things, even if it is considered a duty and not a true passion.
The lower class, well they are the ones we’re talking about here. The people who live one paycheck from disaster, the ones who’ve hit the wall and live the disaster, and those who have mental illness and can’t help themselves, and their parents couldn’t help them because they didn’t have the millions of $$ for treatment. The children who see violence by their homes every day. The gang members who might have been engineers except for where they were born. The starving people with nothing to eat and no where warm to go.
It’s the middle class that I’m talking about. Yes you. The ones who have money in the bank, and solid jobs, and go drink a beer with the boys on Saturday nights. You are coddled into your beliefs that everything is safe and warm, and your perception doesn’t see the connection between you and those children. But there is. There is a tether between the entire web of humans. It is my belief that those sheep who are so wrapped up in their blanket of fuzzy perception, willing to give up each right we were given as humans to pursue life and liberty and the joy of living, willing to hand over what is precious and a birthright of each human living on the planet, it is those sheep who under examination validate my statement that life is perception. In truth, I don’t believe that the data of people standing on street corners, or the sound of the news about poverty, and violence, and those thousands of people stranded in New Orleans without food, water or even a way to take care of the dead and dying, and certainly not any feelings regarding anything that might damage their own cocoons of safety, that data is filtered out as noise. They just never consciously receive it. Those neuron receptors were turned off some where along the way. And that is how people sanction such horrible continuance of a great number of things that plague us here on this insignificant ball of water.
It isn’t that people are genuinely mean, or intentionally attempt to keep people down or poor or unhealthy. (Well some do, but that is a different rant). It’s that they just don’t see/hear/feel it. They are not capable of perceiving it. Again proving that perception shapes reality for all of us.
