This one is REALLY funny...

In the old days before running water, the best place to live was up river; that way the percentage of piss in your drinking water was less. Over time we learnt to justify fighting each other for the higher ground instead of encouraging the collective to stop pissing in the water.

Surely all of the intelligence that has come and gone before would have seen the connection between piss and land value, don't you think?

How about that little black boy screaming into the void as his daddy lay dead, bleeding like a stuck pig into a drain, on that drizzly Sunday morning? Do we see the connection between his pain and society's ills?

At this point you MUST be feeling gypped because of the title, but TRUST me it gets better, this one ends funny.

Our society is circling the drain because the people (you and me), who are supposed to give a shit about that little black boy standing in the early morning drizzle screaming for someone, anyone, to make his world make sense now that his daddy is dead are so self absorbed that we do not see the connection between him and our own children.

How did we get to be so pious and sanctimonious that 'we' have no problem diagnosing the cause without knowing the facts or seeing our own hand in the matter?

We answer the question our compassion asks that his lifestyle, his activities somehow led him to that end, and our compassionate voice, realizing that it is talking to an asshole, get's quieter over time. Yet that little boy, if statistics bear out, will grow up to be an angry man, and along the way his pain will metastasize to anger and then rage, and at some point someone else will be left crying in the rain, and we still don't get it.

Before you switch off know this, you can fuel your denial in whichever way fits your fancy and you can mute the uncomfortable stories all you want, but the circle of separation between your world and his is getting tighter, and it is only a matter of time before your worlds collide. 

We need to get over ourselves before it is too late and do what it takes to fix this, and as uncomfortable as this discussion is, we HAVE to have it.

The system is broken, the people are hurting and our best years are being spent pursuing conspicuous consumption. If you live a life of opulence and you think you deserve it because of some effort you made you're deluded, and worse, because you do not see that your need to deprive others to cover your own sense of inadequacy while pithy and sad is not the whole problem here, but actually fuels the demise of the quality of life you are chasing is saddest of all.

Would that we could get over ourselves for a minute and realize that the equity trapped in our delusions of grandeur could solve ALL the problems that plague our society, we would need no religion, no life coach, no gurus to provide us with answers.

We need them now because we need someone, anyone to tell us w'ere not really assholes, that it IS okay to be this self absorbed.

It's not.

Our diseases are common, our pain is shared, and if we do not get it and get it quick we will make the world harder for our children and for theirs.

Our education system fails them and we blame them for their lack of education. Our banks work to prevent them from owning homes yet we curse them for squatting and for needing Government subsidized housing.

We are both the problem and solution here, and we need to face it.

We need to take action beyond lip service, to join hands, show compassion, find solutions that lift our brothers up; We need to care about others and care deeply, way beyond the dollar we give the grocery bag boy and the ghetto youth wiping our window at the traffic light.

We need to provide decent wages for decent jobs, hope and opportunity and access to equity and ownership so that all can be contributing members of society.

Rounding up the homeless and killing the little blacks boys is not going to solve the problem, and if we do not find a way to share this world a little better it is only going to get worse.

Much worse.

We need to learn to stop pissing in our own water, because we are almost out of time.

How funny is that?