A man on his way to work, in a $3,000 Giorgio Armani suit, along with a $5,000 DateJust Tapestry Rolex watch, firmly attached to his right wrist, a $3,000 Brunello Cucinelli leather portfolio briefcase in his left hand and wearing a pair of $2,000 Berluti calf leather dress shoes, comes upon a drowning woman.
The woman had accidentally fallen into a deep wide hole filled with muddy oil saturated water, just a few seconds before our protagonist arrived. The hole resulted from an unfinished construction project that was delayed.
Without hesitation, without thought, and with total disregard for his expensive accessories, our hero instinctively jumps into the water, briefcase still in hand and saves the drowning woman, while literally contaminating over $12,000 worth of personal accessorizing.
Our hero, though vain, is a good guy with a big heart. The next day, after replacing his expensive gear, our hero happens again upon a different drowning person, in the same predicament as the lady in the ‘pond’ from the day before; only this time he takes the time to set down his briefcase, remove his watch, jacket, and shoes, and then jumps in, to once again rescue a damsel in distress.
On his third day, while walking to work, our good man happens upon the same scene with yet another new person, drowning. This time, however, he looks around the area to see if a rope is nearby. And as good fortune would have it, there was a rope within reach. He threw the rope to the drowning person, who grabbed it, immediately. He then pulled her to ‘shore’, once again saving a life.
On his fourth day to work, he looked the other way, away from the water hole as he strode to work. He heard some yelling and screaming but paid no heed.
On his fifth day to work, he chose a different path, altogether.
Moral of the story – When there are simply way too many conditions in the world which need our attention, time, resources, or energy to repair and or otherwise remedy, we tend to satiate and become desensitized to the needs of the downtrodden, simply because there are so many of them, too many of them, actually.
With the advent of mass global instant communication networks, we are bombarded, hourly, with a world in crisis to which we are useless to assist, 99.99999% of the time.
As a species, we evolved while living in small groups, between 200 – 500. And as a single individual, living in a small group of people, the problems that each person faced were always parochial in nature. The problems they faced together were both concrete and local, but the problems we face today are anything but that.
Conclusion – we were not originally ‘designed’ by God driven nature to emotionally deal with today’s worldwide problems. Our little group of roughly 500 nomads, who once roamed the Earth together looking for food and shelter, has been replaced with a much larger tribe of 8 billion plus bi-peds just trying to survive, and possibly thrive.
I often wonder if out of our global family of over 8 billion brothers and sisters, how many of us are truly thriving? I fear that this number is quite small and getting smaller by the day, I’d say.
Later my good folks
