There is blood on our hands – the blood of self-righteousness and hypocrisy, the blood of complicity and complacency. Our hands and hearts are filthy with hate and discrimination and cowardice and ignorance.
We peer all but blindly around the log in our own eyes, through the cracked, dirty glass of our lives and complain bitterly about the mite in our neighbour’s eye, about the state of his dwelling. We sit on the porch of our own dilapidated structures, our flawed religions and doctrines, our anachronistic dogma. We stare across, unkempt, decaying yards, broken down morals and self-serving belief systems. And we criticize. And while we throw stones at those we label sinners, unGodly, we remain seemingly unconscious of the fact that a well-placed stone could take us down. We try to force or belief systems on others using methods that compromise the morals and values of that same system – we kill people in an effort to force them to embrace a religion that speaks explicitly against killing others. We spread hate and anger and bigotry in the name of a being we’re trying to convince people is the epitome of love and mercy and acceptance.We start wars against others that take innocent lives and justify it by pretending that we’re trying to save them. While we do nothing to improve ourselves, we lambaste others for what we perceive as flaws. We are none of us perfect. Not a single one of us is without sin or fault or blame. What we do that is revered among our peers is reviled among others.
And we continue to reap the consequences. Every war ever fought, every missile launched, every bomb dropped, every shot fired. The blood of every single life lost is on all our hands. Every man, woman and child whose existence was cut short is a consequence of our continued failure to learn from the past, from recorded history. We still hold on to the ignorance of racism and discrimination – so insecure in our humanity that we feel we must be better than someone else even if the only thing that differentiates us from that someone else is the colour of our skin or the tilt of our eyes or the language we speak. We still glorify and perpetuate imperfect systems because we are too lazy to effect change, because it benefits enough persons that we are content with its limitations. People so desperate for a voice, for power, for their fifteen minutes of fame, that they willingly compromise the health and well-being of even the youngest and the most vulnerable among us.
And so we live in a world where wars are fought over territory for the sake of the ownership of that territory or for the exploitation of that territory for the monetary gain of a few; wars that claim millions of lives, wars that traumatize and that trivialize the value of human beings; where lives lost are categorized as ‘collateral damage’. We live in a world where governments use people as pawns in power plays designed to start those wars, where your life could be lost simply because someone needed a reason to launch an attack on someone else. We live in a world where limited importance is placed on the health and well-being of a human but debates about how money is allocated and spent can shut down the entire government system. We live in a word where we are surrounded by everything we need to be well, natural science, medical science but our minds and spirits are slowly being poisoned by misinformation, disinformation and an almost complete dearth of logic.
And so many of us do so little, too many of us do nothing at all. So much so that those who genuinely try, who genuinely care, still feel tainted and guilty and ashamed. I’m tired of feeling that way. I’m tired of crying myself hoarse and sick over lives that have only touched mine because of their tragic end brought about by the selfish, egotistical and evil machinations of others. I’m tired of feeling like I have blood on my hands…
The Happiness Paradigm 