I hate my plasma

This evening, I was driving home from dance class when it occurred to me that I had passed at least two people who were standing bare foot in the wet street, holding poorly written cardboard signs, pleading for help.  Homeless beggars would be the most common term to label a sight, but in truth it’s just another name categorically assigned to a social reality, devoid of desperate confrontation. I thought to myself “I just bought a frikken plasma, and there’s a kid standing in the cold rain praying on any human compassion that he can possibly hope to find.  

I felt the need to question the nonchalance and reluctance of the passing drivers.  Of course you can’t feed the world, and there’s a hungry vagrant at almost every traffic light.  But it’s not the practicality behind this logic that distresses me, it’s the blatant resistance to another person’s pain that is deemed an acceptable act of living. Of course, we validate this norm by blaming the miss handled funds and unstable economics of the country; however that does not excuse the utter disregard and inhumane intolerance for another person’s suffering.

Is the human chord that ingenuine? Are we programmed to care only when the situation requires such charity? At a fundraiser, a church event, or after a natural disaster that’s wiped out hundreds of helpless families? What about the person standing at the robot right next to your home. Does this person not have a heart felt story?  He may not have the money to market his pain through public awareness campaigns, or a photographer on standby to take his picture when he is at his lowest, but I can assure you, this man is riddled with the gut wrenching agony of having to face every daunting hour of every dark day. Instead of empathising with the destitute nobody, we judge instead.  Even worse, we learn to completely ignore the filthy silhouette that passes our car window, whilst we continue to fist pump to 5fm’s top twenty.

I ask myself if we have too much. Because I can’t for the life of me believe that a brother born from the same creator wouldn’t want to help another brother in dire need. It’s the human condition, we all exist in it.  We all know hunger, thirst, warmth and shelter. Maslow wasn’t a rocket scientist, merely a fundamentalist. I am therefore of opinion that our privileged birth rights are accountable for the conditioning of an inherent sense of materialistic worth.  We know not a world where our own substance and existence is not a manifestation of the “things” we have.  Who are we without these fleeting objects?  With no knowledge of what’s it’s like to be powerless, naked and starved of basic fulfilment, we cannot possibly fathom the raw and fragile survival of one without.

Herein lies the only reasoning that I can conclude to make sense of our shameless lack of sympathy.  The culprit that is taught and learned. I hate my plasma and everything it stands for.  People say we are only human, but if you look closely, we are fast becoming less human than we realise.