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The unquantifiable amount of suffering in the world

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Posted

Is it even worth caring anymore? Maybe we should just care about what we can influence. Maybe we should just lie down and. Not.

 

What do you think? :)

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Posted

I think it's worth caring about. I'm sure this post is facetious in some way, but for example, this is the chain of events in my life:

 

1) Make minimum wage

2) Work on career path

3) Go to school

 

Going to school and working on a career are both things that go much, much more slowly because the minimum wage is so low. So I have to pour as much time as I can into juggling what I can. I have to focus on my career path intently because otherwise I have no opportunities to get ahead and make enough money to have any free time that could go into campaigning for a better future for everybody. Younger people can't be as politically active as adults because they don't have their shit figured out yet. Or, they're just too poor to have time for things like that. The poor, the young, the minorities; they tend to be liberal people. But being poor makes you have less influence. Being poor gives you less opportunities to have a say in things. And that is a disgusting and filthy truth to exist in a place that claims to be a democracy.

 

There's so much rampant corruption everywhere, and people are brainwashed by the extreme right constantly, and oftentimes it seems so hopeless to care because it does seem like madness is the dominating force of the world. But that attitude has historically been proven wrong time and time again. Right now the US is gaining rapid momentum on same-sex marriage. The drug war has been exposed to be a pawn of corrupt governments and its effectiveness has become less and less apparent to the average person. We will probably get tired of pointless wars in the Middle East at some point. In time, good ideas triumph over bad ones, but it requires people that care, and it requires people that might not have previously cared to start caring. And that's just domestic issues. As far as foreign policy goes, there's probably no country more fucked up than the US. But I am optimistic that one day that'll change. I'm optimistic that one day the good will triumph over the bad, and that we'll work towards truer equality.

 

I'm very susceptible to human suffering. There is probably nothing that enrages me more than people who lack basic empathetic principles, and hypocrites. And those people tend to be in charge. My mother has been poor most her life. She came from a poor country, and I've been there. Though people are happy, I've seen the blind and homeless in the streets, I've seen an open-casket funeral for a man whose head had to be partially reconstructed because he was shot in the side of the face (with a shotgun) due to gang activities, and I've seen a man constructing a tiny baby coffin out on the dirt paths. Our family's was the fifth in the area to get running water. But the most disgusting thing I might have seen was the gigantic building that might have been three stories high were it not a one-story cathedral. It could have been a homeless shelter or some other philanthropic organization, but it was just a place of worship. And worship is just a way to convince yourself your life is acceptable despite evidence to the contrary. All that stuff can be tied to poverty, to corruption, to poor foreign policy, to lack of natural resources and the technologies to obtain them, to subpar education systems. 

 

As far as what we can influence, we can't really do much about all these widespread issues. But I think if the US were run by the good of the people rather than the corruption of money, it could be a superpower in aiding other countries in constructive ways rather than destructive ones. I don't have much empirical evidence to back that claim up, but there are countries much better off than us in terms of just about everything, but they're just not as nosy as we are. I'd like if in my lifetime, I could see the US dropping technologies for water obtainment and free education onto impoverished nations rather than bombs.

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