My Blog

I’m a social person. I go out usually twice a weekend. I lunch with friends. I keep in touch with people from high school and college. My nature is to be social. Lately, I’ve been having many conversations with men and women in their 20s and 30s where the speak turns negative. "I have no money." "I can’t get a girlfriend." "My car sucks." "I hate my job." "Why am I not married?"

It’s a sad state when these educated, successful, smart, and good people live their lives in various states of misery. A few blogs ago I asked and answered the question, "Why is everyone depressed?" My answers were societal based, that the 24 hour news cycle, porn, traffic and the obsession with looking "good" were making us all go crazy. And I do believe societal pressure does contribute to our malaise.  But perhaps even more significant is the way that we define ourselves by who we are not instead of who we are.

Part of it is the Protestant work ethic brought to America on the Mayflower. We are never satisfied with what we have and we work harder and harder until we succeed. That’s the American dream in a nut shell. It’s why my great grandparents moved from Russia to peddle fruit in South Bend, Indiana but encouraged their seven children to enter the middle class through skilled employment and marriage. It’s why you never hear anyone say, "I’m going to take a demotion so that I can have more free time." We work hard because we desire more money, more prestige and even more responsibility. We educate ourselves not for the love of learning, but to place in to a higher salary scale. These are not criticisms of our society; it is this drive that has made us the richest nation in the world.

Where this ethos goes awry is when we spend our lives never satisfied and perpetually unhappy. We have no ability to reflect upon who we are. We only dwell on what we don’t own, what we don’t look like, what we don’t have, who we don’t have, and how we don’t have it and need to get it NOW.

I’m not married. I’m not thin. I’m not rich. I’m not at the top of my profession. I’m not in love. I don’t have kids. I don’t have the nicest car. I don’t have the best relationship with my parents.

These "nots" are toxic. They eat away at our souls. They make us less than who we can be. They take years off our life.

What if we walked around with a skip in our step happy about who we are?

I have a lot of good friends. I look great. I have enough money to buy food, clothes, pay rent and go out. I enjoy my work. My car runs well. My parents are living and well. I have plenty of time to spend my life the way I want to.

What if that’s the way we lived every day, every minute, every hour? I’m not suggesting that we should just say, "forget it" and not try and improve ourselves. But if we work out and eat right we should do so to feel good, not to fit in to some standard that is impossible to meet. If we go back to school, it should be to better ourselves, to challenge ourselves to make our lives more meaningful, not just because it looks good on a resume. If we buy a house we can’t lament being house poor, but enjoying the place where we live.

What would the world be like if we embraced this attitude? What if we defined each other by what we are instead of what we are not? Instead of saying, "She’s not married." "He’s unemployed." "They don’t have children." "They still rent," say: "She’s awesome. We always have a good time together." What if we value people for the qualities that we love about them instead of the qualities that we subjectively view as important.

So I’m going to try buying these new glasses and see how they work. Instead of Sharna, the single woman, I’m going to be Sharna the fun-loving good friend and teacher. If I date, it’s not going to be to help me achieve what I’m not, it’s going to be to have fun and meet cool people.

What kind of glasses will you be wearing this fall?

The images from the scenes in Louisiana and Mississippi are horrific: the twitching leg of a dying person; babies attempting to breastfeed from women who are suffering from malnutrition; an elderly man with hopelessness in his eyes sitting in his wheelchair with his hands in his face; a woman breaking down as she lists to a reporter seven family members who are missing.  The criticism of the Bush administration and FEMA is rampant, as it should be. Americans and the world ask, “Where was the Federal Government? Where was the National Guard? How could a country as rich as the United States of America let a place become so chaotic and anarchic and allow the poor to suffer?”

A colleague of mine marveled that the images from the South would lead one to believe that we are all two or three days from catastrophe.  The thought is sobering to be sure, but unfair. Had he or I lived in New Orleans, we would have driven our car out of the city. We would have paid the $1,000 for a plane ticket.

Indeed, eighty percent of populace of New Orleans heeded the evacuation order. Some didn’t because they were stubborn. But some didn’t simply because they did not have automobiles. They did not have the means to evacuate or money for a bus ticket.

How could someone be so poor that they couldn’t afford a bus ticket that would ensure their safety and the safety of their children?

In the South, 14.1 percent of the population lives under the poverty level, the highest percentage in the nation. (http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/histpov/hstpov9.html) These are people who don’t have the financial means to secure the basics: food, gas and shelter. They can’t afford what many of us take for granted: health care and higher education.

These are the people who couldn’t afford to leave Mississippi or Louisiana. These are the people who had little and now have nothing.

So this is what gets me. It’s not that our government was so inept in helping expedite the rescue and rebuild effort. Our focus is on terrorism and not natural disasters even though we’ve really only had a couple of terrorist attacks in the history of our nation and hurricanes strike several times a year. What is grotesque is that we are spending billions of dollars fighting on war on terrorism in Iraq, a place that has never threatened the United States, when there are Americans who cannot buy milk for their children.

Every president fights a war in another nation. Some are just wars, many are not. My question is when are we going to fight a war on poverty in our own country? When is the president of the United States going to stand before the U.S. Congress and ask for aid for education, job training, family planning and health care instead of bombs, guns, and planes for invasions overseas?

Socialism, you cry. Socialism. You are a socialist! Call me whatever you want. Call me a Republican. No don’t do that. Isn’t President Bush a socialist? Instead of my tax dollars going to social welfare programs in the United States, it is going to the Iraqis and Afghanis and paying for the coffins of 1800 + American troops.

“Hundreds of thousands of American servicemen and women are deployed across the world in the war on terror,” President Bush said. “By bringing hope to the oppressed, and delivering justice to the violent, they are making America more secure.”

And perhaps they are. But who is helping the oppressed in our own nation? What if we took some of those servicemen trained them to be doctors and teachers and had them serve in the poor areas of our own country.

“I believe the most solemn duty of the American president is to protect the American people,” said President Bush. “If America shows uncertainty and weakness in this decade, the world will drift toward tragedy. This will not happen on my watch.”

But sir it has. We have shown uncertainty and weakness by not addressing the ills of our own society. You and Congress have allowed the poor of our country to not just drift, but drown.

Our own President likes to quote from the Bible, so I will to:

"He who gives to the poor will lack nothing, but he who closes his eyes to them receives many curses." -Proverbs 28:27

We have closed our eyes long enough. We must address the critical issue of poverty in this country. Gang violence, crime, homelessness are synonymous with the anarchic behavior occurring in the areas affected for Katrina.

President Bush, please fight another war. Invade. Fight.

Call it Operation End Poverty. It’s not catchy, but it would be great.

…………..

To help the victims of the hurricane donate online to:

http://www.redcross.org/

http://www.secondharvest.org/default.asp

http://www.salvationarmyusa.org/USNSAHome.htm

http://www.bushclintonkatrinafund.org/

http://www.ujc.org/