This morning, on my drive home after dropping my boys off at school, I saw a pickup truck full of Dominican soldiers stopping various vehicles, mostly public transport, looking for dark-skinned Haitians to arrest and deport. Tears came to my eyes seeing them apprehend people, human beings, and put them in the back of the truck. I could feel the despair and resignation stale and heavy in the air. What made it so much worse was the excitement and enthusiasm of the Dominican soldiers, hell-bent on doing their "job" to "protect" the "good guys" and "defeat" the "bad guys". Dang, what are we humans doing to each other, in the name of "security" and "safety"?! Are we so brainwashed and blinded by heroic tales of "good" overcoming "evil", that we've forgotten how to see the beautiful, divine preciousness in our fellow Human Beings?
I couldn't help but think to myself, what if we were as excited to find people to HELP, as these soldiers were to find people to punish. What if, instead of striving vigorously to "protect" ourselves from the poor and down-trodden, we sought as relentlessly to find ways to lift them out of poverty and despair? Pretty soon, we wouldn't have anyone left to "protect" ourselves from!
America alone spends nearly $1 TRILLION, PER YEAR on its military budget. How many lives could we save, how many could we brighten, with just a fraction of that? How much would it save our economy if we realized there's far more than enough to go around, many times over, and we no longer have to fight over table scraps, when their is an enormous buffet table of abundance available to us?
We are still fighting an ancient war, on ancient terms. Scarcity is gone. We have conquered it, once and for all. Now, we simply have to conquer our own demons that formed during times of actual scarcity, and leave behind the mindset that is responsible for so much needless suffering.
Change isn't easy, it takes some effort and reorientation to a new reality. What's on the other side of that change, though, is a world of far greater peace and harmony, a world we all would truly feel safer and more secure in. Isn't that something we can all agree would feel pretty darn good?
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