Overmatched by a gigantic, humongous, ginormous socio-economic system……

You know, my grandson calls a piece of writing like this a “blog” – which, I guess, is what most people call it these days….when I was in the newspaper business, we called a piece of writing like this a “column”…..regardless what you call it, I have always taken the production of an opinion piece like this very seriously. I never underestimate the power of the written word to effect change. In some ways, I feel the old adage, “the pen is mightier than the sword”, is sort of true…..swords can change a situation very quickly for the short term, words are more likely to change things slowly, but the change is more likely to be long lasting…..

I have spent a lifetime trying to effect change through my writing. It’s what I do. When I rail on and on about the vast social injustices on Planet Earth, I often have people tell me I need to do more than just write about social injustice. Why not go somewhere in the Third World and help build a school or a hospital? I’ve been told to “put up or shut up!” But because of the type of person I am – which is mostly sort of like the cowardly lion in Wizard of Oz, I’m never going anywhere to build anything. I don’t travel and I don’t build stuff – I’m bad at both. But way back in the mists of time, I discovered that I have a bit of a knack for writing. I have an ability to take fairly complex ideas and issues and make them easier to understand for almost everybody. And the words just kind of flow out of me when I’m writing about something I feel passion for.

Which brings me back to the writing of this “blog” or “column” each week. I could really just write about social justice every week. Because I just keep looking around the planet and I think the only thing that really matters a hoot is creating some type of equity so that everyone who is born here has a chance for a decent and worthwhile life. You know, I’ve heard the phrase, “life’s not fair”, about 100,000 times over the course of my life. And I admit that it’s a basic truism that life is indeed not fair – for most of the human beings living here. It’s sort of more than fair for the really rich people and a few other folk, but it’s mostly not fair for nearly everyone else in one way or another.

And what I don’t get about this is that we could so easily fix it. We could, with the relative snap of a finger, make life just a whole lot fairer. If we took some of the wealth from the grotesquely wealthy – and there are a bunch of them these days – we could make some sort of headway in making life just a tiny bit more equitable. It’s not rocket science, people – it’s just simple old arithmetic…..we all learn it in public school. But of course the really big issue is that our entire socio-economic system is bloated and corrupt and evil. It over rewards a tiny number of people for their contributions to the system, while grossly under rewarding everyone else. It’s just not the way things should work. And that’s a certainty.

You know I’ve heard a bunch of people say lately that there are sort of degrees of something we call “truth”, and you know that’s a pile of crap. Truth is absolute and universal. We have sunk so low in our world that we feel that truth is somehow negotiable. Balderdash, my friends, balderdash….don’t believe a word of it. And world hunger and world poverty are not negotiable either….they are absolute and universal….they are real and they are terrible – and we could fix them. But for some unknown reason, we allow them to persist. Sooner or later, they will be fixed – but, at this point, it’s more likely to be by the sword instead of the pen.

Anyway, I could indeed write about social justice issues every week, but it gets frustrating after about 40 years of doing it and nobody seems to be listening and nobody seems to care much at all. If I make a post on Facebook about what I’m having for dinner, I’m likely to get lots of likes…..if I post about social justice issues, not so much. Most people don’t really even want to talk about it. Now before you get all riled up, please realize that I’m fully aware of the many, many people on our planet trying to do good work each and every day. But they are badly overmatched by a gigantic, humongous, ginormous socio-economic system that seems beyond their control…..