Well, the poverty level statistics came out this week, and things haven’t been this bad since 1993.
Look to your left; look to your right. About one in every six of us is now considered to be living below the poverty level. In 1993, the average new house was $113,000, the average income was $31,230, the average car was $13,000 and tuition at Harvard was at $23,500. By 2010 you could nearly double every one of those numbers except the average family income which was only $50,000. (Instead of $62,500.)
One of my favorite comparisons has always been that Harvard’s tuition was right around $40,000 and the cost to keep a prisoner in jail for one year is about $45,000. Go figure! If you extrapolate the number of people in prisons based on the entire population of the United States, it works out to about one in every 31 adults. Between 2.3 million and 2.4 million Americans are behind bars. America incarcerates nine times more people than Germany and 12 times more people than Japan. So, let’s do the math. That adds up to nearly $104 billion dollars a year for prison. (It’s BIG business.)
The folks on Wall Street and in Washington, D.C. who so cunningly put us into this mess are, by and large, not in prison. Yet, the rest of us are getting locked up for stealing Tide from the 7-Eleven (For the record, some folks steal other brands of detergent.)
We’re spending about $700 billion on defense, and the rest of the world combined is spending about that same number. So $1.4 trillion later, that adds up to $236 per capita worldwide on defense, and we still have 24,000 nuclear missiles laying around, enough to blow up the planet plenty of times.
Now, if you are really tracking me here, you’re starting to get the picture: According to the World Bank, more than 1 billion people live in conditions of extreme poverty and 15-20 million people are starving every year. What the heck are we thinking? Is it all because we live in a competitive world?
Well, I have a suggestion. We could solve the world’s problems by simply “thinking differently.”
Ready? Let’s turn everything over to the women.
We all know that men have more testosterone than women. It makes us physically strong, but it also makes us more aggressive and competitive. This results in war and violence being accepted as the normal way to settle things, and war is just @#$% crazy!
If we turn everything over to the feminine ways of compassion, understanding and forgiveness, what would happen?
We’ve seen time after time that if you are brutal and retaliatory with people, they will learn to hate and fear you. If you give people love, compassion and respect they will eventually return the compliment. Heck, I ran a hospital like that for a decade and we grew and grew.
Arguments against this way of thinking? We live in a world of winners and losers, but the self-proclaimed winners tend to be wealthy men who regard themselves as winners. These are the guys who dominate our world, and therefore, have the most to say.
We don’t hear very much about a matriarchal society, except from feminists, which is too bad because feminism could help both women and men.
OK, before all of you guys jump on your Harley’s and beat me to a bloody pulp, throw down a brewskie and ask yourself one fundamental question, “Is any of this world dominance stuff really working for us?”
Seriously, our infrastructure is collapsing, the education system is hurting, we’re going broke on bullets and that’s the good news.
Why not take a break from all of this running the world stuff and let the ladies take over? Hey, maybe we’ll even live a little longer! Guys?
And ladies, if it doesn’t work, “Just shoot me!”
(Nick Jacobs, Windber, international director for SunStone Consulting, LLC is the author of the blog Healinghospitals.com.)
One in six in poverty
-
-
-
Comments0
-
-
-
0
Comments (0)
Add comments | Discussion FAQCurrently there are no comments. Be the first to comment!
