(no subject)
two entries by me in the last six months, and then two that are less than a couple of days apart. Tres tres strange world. I am more like Pat every day, in some ways, and since pat is a person who I would like to be like (in some ways), I am happy. Like the way he writes, he is golden and he has this way of saying ten times as much as he wants to say in his rhetoric while hiding what he wants to say beyond, like gold in the bushes, yet he drops all the gold out of the back of the sack. Perhaps I write this way for my heart longs for what I used to know.
You never stop missing people. Yet today, there was a sermon at church, which was about consumerism, vaguely, and how as americans, if we gave away roughly 1-2 percent, we could stop most every bit of poverty in the world. Well, maybe not all, but close to all. To think, what a small amount that would be. What a world we live in, where we can't do things like that. It is an obligaiton of us all, for there is no such thing as ownership. Those that lived a long time ago, the Amerindians that were here a while back, with their absence of the idea of ownership, were so much more advanced than us. What is it to own something? Is it control? We don't even control our own bodies. Try not going to the bathroom for six days. I'll give you all that I can give you (I would say own, but the point is no one owns anything) if you could control your body enough to not do that. I could set a hundred billion dollars in front of someone and tell them that, and she or he would fail to do that. That simple, we don't even control our bodily functions that well, so how much can we control those things that are not part of our body.
Okay, there's way too much on my desk now and ultimately, I control it. I can move the coke can from one side to the other, can pick up and move my post-it notes, or my keys or can throw my thing of binder clips in the trash. I can take a match and burn the receipt that should be in the trash. So you would argue all those things are mine. How about the tupperware that i have to return to Jason? That's not mine, and yet I can do the same thing with it. So to define ownership, it's basically impossible.
I believe we are entrusted with things, those things which we can use for good or for bad. Entrust implies that something else is doing the entrusting, and I believe that's God, but regardless of your belief on that, I feel my points are still valid. The ultimate point of all this is that we don't own things, we can only use them, we can only use the land we walk on, we can only use the food we eat, the things we have in our houses, the clothes we wear. And we can use them to pleasure either ourselves or others. It is fine to pleasure ourselves, and it is good, there is nothing wrong with that in itself. But when we pleasure ourselves while others starve, what is that to us? What are we to do? And how will we be judged?
Ultimately, we all die. Yet we all live on. We are not forgotten by history, collectively, the concept of America and the empire of the United States will last in history for as long as history exists. We are that powerful and influential. People will note America if only for the fact that for a period of time, a people controlled the resources necessary to completely end poverty. The historians, just like we do today, will calculate the numbers and find that we have the resources to still live rather well and to keep others from starving. And they will see if we did, and they will consider us to the highest regard if we do, and they will consider us as nothing more than the Romans or the Mongolian horde, barbarians, Vandals of an economic sort, if we do not.
I hate trying to think what all this means. And I wish I had the courage to do my part. I can give my one, two, five percent. I wish others could too.
You never stop missing people. Yet today, there was a sermon at church, which was about consumerism, vaguely, and how as americans, if we gave away roughly 1-2 percent, we could stop most every bit of poverty in the world. Well, maybe not all, but close to all. To think, what a small amount that would be. What a world we live in, where we can't do things like that. It is an obligaiton of us all, for there is no such thing as ownership. Those that lived a long time ago, the Amerindians that were here a while back, with their absence of the idea of ownership, were so much more advanced than us. What is it to own something? Is it control? We don't even control our own bodies. Try not going to the bathroom for six days. I'll give you all that I can give you (I would say own, but the point is no one owns anything) if you could control your body enough to not do that. I could set a hundred billion dollars in front of someone and tell them that, and she or he would fail to do that. That simple, we don't even control our bodily functions that well, so how much can we control those things that are not part of our body.
Okay, there's way too much on my desk now and ultimately, I control it. I can move the coke can from one side to the other, can pick up and move my post-it notes, or my keys or can throw my thing of binder clips in the trash. I can take a match and burn the receipt that should be in the trash. So you would argue all those things are mine. How about the tupperware that i have to return to Jason? That's not mine, and yet I can do the same thing with it. So to define ownership, it's basically impossible.
I believe we are entrusted with things, those things which we can use for good or for bad. Entrust implies that something else is doing the entrusting, and I believe that's God, but regardless of your belief on that, I feel my points are still valid. The ultimate point of all this is that we don't own things, we can only use them, we can only use the land we walk on, we can only use the food we eat, the things we have in our houses, the clothes we wear. And we can use them to pleasure either ourselves or others. It is fine to pleasure ourselves, and it is good, there is nothing wrong with that in itself. But when we pleasure ourselves while others starve, what is that to us? What are we to do? And how will we be judged?
Ultimately, we all die. Yet we all live on. We are not forgotten by history, collectively, the concept of America and the empire of the United States will last in history for as long as history exists. We are that powerful and influential. People will note America if only for the fact that for a period of time, a people controlled the resources necessary to completely end poverty. The historians, just like we do today, will calculate the numbers and find that we have the resources to still live rather well and to keep others from starving. And they will see if we did, and they will consider us to the highest regard if we do, and they will consider us as nothing more than the Romans or the Mongolian horde, barbarians, Vandals of an economic sort, if we do not.
I hate trying to think what all this means. And I wish I had the courage to do my part. I can give my one, two, five percent. I wish others could too.