Why?Originally Posted by redfox
Why?
The responses to this thread are wonderful. Thank you everyone.
One thing that occurred to me after I posted this thread. At the time I was hired, the human resources director at the place I was hired also did not have a car and bicycled everywhere. (He has since, like me, purchased a car, but we both still bicycle most of the time). I guess that may have insulated me a little bit from any judgement over my transportation choice, and also fits in to my theory that in certain geographic regions in the U.S. people may be more or less compelled to be conformist.
Because we have built a society that allows our fellow human beings to suffer and die in abject poverty, while others have extraordinary wealth. It is wrong.
Does poverty automatically equal suffering? As a child, we lived in extreme poverty, although I only remember happiness and comfort. I remember those families who were better off made me a bit jealous, but I never held it against them. It wasn't their fault we were poor.
"Things should be made as simple as possible, but not one bit simpler." ~ Albert Einstein
Is "wealth" zero-sum? If Person A has "wealth", did it come from food taken out of the mouth of Person B?
Being homeless is desperately terrible, and yes, leads to suffering, illness, and early death. Poverty that is such that basic needs are not met -- food, shelter, medical care, education, safety -- leads to suffering and misery. Both are preventable, and we know how to do this. We have enough in our world for all to be adequately cared for, and as a congregate species, we are capable of it.
I think it is vastly more complex than that - more so, I admit, than I understand. At this point, I think the damage to the planet caused by pollution and extractive industries cause the biggest impact on peoples whose lives do not involve such a large degree of consumption. As Alan pointed out, a family can grow up without much money and still have a much higher return of love and happiness than a vastly wealthy person, but when the landscape you depend on falls apart, or your community begins to suffer birth defects because your relative wealth makes it easier for your community to be a corporate chemical dumping ground, then your lives are negatively impacted by the wealthy of the world who give no thought to such things. I like to support working toward a lesser degree of consumption not because I think my extravagance takes food directly out of the mouths of the poor, but because I do not feel the planet can support the degree of consumption we have grown accustomed to. Do I think it is unfair that I can afford an iPod while a poor third world person might not? No, not really. I'm not going to be embarrassed by the accident of where I was born. But I'm going to think twice before I replace something that doesn't need to be replaced when I think of the people in poor countries exposed to toxic fumes as they try to burn the precious metals out of all the e-waste that is shipped to them.
One can be happy living a minimal life in a hunter-gatherer society on a healthy, relatively clean planet. But I think as a race we know have to consciously work toward that end.
Your free to take in as many as you like.
How condescending of you. What is your point?
If your concerned about the homeless, and you have a home that I assume has more than one bedroom, why don't you take some in?
Or do you just want to use other peoples money?
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