Nice article. Looking forward for more!

http://PiranhaCrunch.com/videos shows some great piranha videos. Check it out!

Imagine going through life seeing people that had supportive parents that coached them through school and purchased everything they needed. Kids who didn’t have your intelligence and didn’t work as hard but also didn’t have to work night jobs to pay the rent. Didn’t even really have to cook their meals or wash their own dishes.

I dropped out of high school simply because it was a social pond of piranhas. With the help of a girlfriend I got into college but then she lost interest. Eventually I dropped out of college due to simple lack of mentoring in the rough spots. I wasn’t brave enough to attempt the hardest classes in engineering or biology despite the fact that I was an avid science fiction reader. I had enough to juggle just to be in school.

I dropped out, worked at this and that, got another girlfriend, married and eventually secured enough resources to go back to college. This time I was within one semester of success when I was struck down by an illness.

If you’re sick in college they don’t fight to get you through but rather encourage you to drop out for the semester and restart. Your debt, however, doesn’t go away. You don’t really get to start again.

After years of climbing a sand slope again and again only to be mocked by those born on the platau of wealth when I slide back down. After years of kicks where the wealthy got cushions. After that last extra humiliation that wasn’t needed.

The time will come when it will be understood that the law just don’t have the gas to get to the Mcmansions. When that happens a bit of overdue accounting will happen. Not murderous perhaps but coup will be counted.

Many, many people worked hard their whole lives and were always found wanting when compared to people who barely worked at all. They’re really not happy.

However, if I get my ego stoked or no, even in the middle of great frustration (which is, I think, the root cause of my anger) I can still feel sympathy — for them and for everyone else who is trying to cope. The pain of hunger, or seeing your child stave, isn’t mitigated by memories of what you squandered.

About 10 years ago, a 14 year old Liberian refugee wrote the following in an essay for school, describing her journey as they walked three years to reach a camp. “We had no shoes or slippers for our feet. We ate what we found or what was given to us. It was hard for the rich, becuase they had never tasted bitterness, and seeing them made my heart heavy/”

It was hard for her, too. She saw both her parents die, as well as her sibblings. When I knew her, she was with a woman she called her aunt, though there was no family connection. In return for being allowed to go to high school (unlike most Liberain girls, she has attened school (a very good school) from ages 6-10) she did all the housework and cooking (and washing, in the bathtub) for the aunt, herself, and three children, and looked after the children after school and in the evening. (I knew the children; two were brain danaged, one was mentally unbalancedm, and all need constant supervision.) She’d traded sex for food from the time she was 11, and was very greatful her “aunt” was a good women who didn’t expect that of her. All this, and the sufferings of the rich only moved her to sorrow.

(BTW, she got very poor mark for the essay because the teacher marked her down for such things as saying “shoes or slippers” because people don’t wear slippers outside and “tasted bitterness” becuseyou don’t eat feelings. I thought it was brilliant, and kept a copy. The girl in question trained as a home health aid, and then as an X-ray technician. Last I heard of her, she was on her own, caring for one of the children. She didn’t keep in touch, but I hope she’s alright.)

I think that like love, sympathy isn’t limited to a certain amount within each person, and we have to ration out to those we think deserve it.

MEA

Could it be that mercy comes with a price?

The frequent idea in the comments above and Sharon’s entry, and in many people’s thinking – mine too – is that mercy and forgiveness are infinite. They are. But can they turn out, in some cases (like my neighbor’s?) be a mistake?

“Justice” is often thought about as something mechanical: a computer, following legal “codes”, could expend it. It’s an impoverishment to think of justice like that. Why should we oppose it with mercy?

So how would we react, if at the gate to the new life – a sustainable community – both the mistaken ones and the heartless ones come a-knocking? Do we turn them away and stop preaching our mercy? Do we judge them differently? Or do we let them in and give error and gracelessness a place in our communities all over again? And who are we to judge what is error, what is grace?

It pays to think in particulars here. I often think of my upstairs neighbor, who goes on a three week vacation and leaves her four old and noisy and inefficient AC’s running day and night. Then fastforward and imagine a refuge of sorts, from global warming, from food riots, etc. She is at the gate and it is up to me to let her in or turn her away. And she says “I still don’t believe in global warming, and you’re all lazy environmentalists, but you preach mercy, and here I am!”

It’s hard to decide. It’s hard to have mercy, and to forgive mistakes – or trespasses, however you wish to judge the cause of such destructive behavior – that you know might be repeated…

Thanks, Sharon and commentators, for getting to the heart of this, what it is to be humane, for sticking your neck out.

(*) though I don’t myself mean to assign an ethical purpose to nature, many others do, and that’s fine.

I think part of feeling lucky depends on seeing the glass as half full rather than half empty. Not everyone does this naturally (and I have spent a lot of time learning to do this better), but trying out different perpectives on a “bad” situation can help.

Once, we had no hot water in November for three weeks, before they could come repair it. Priority was given to those with no heating. After the first shock, and the learning to adapt with sponge baths, etc., I actually felt really, really lucky, that this was only going to be temporary, unlike for so many others in the world. In the end, “toughing it out” for three weeks wasn’t so hard, and that first hot shower afterwards was appreciated like never before!

Corinne