a dollar and a dream
Plus: more church photos!
The other day, while out and about, I glanced downward and my eyes — meticulously trained to recognize the green — spied a dollar bill on the mostly snow-covered NYC sidewalk.
I reached down to grab it… glancing up to see if I was being watched.
I was.
A guy in his 20s had just emerged from a coffee place and was counting his change just a few feet from me. (A rare cash-user in this day and age.) It seemed straightforward that the dollar was his.
Our eyes met. He didn’t appear too concerned about this and, to be honest, neither was I.
“Is this yours?” I asked. He shrugged and answered: “I’m pretty sure.”
I handed him the buck with my best “whatever” face and moved on. A mere one-dollar bill is not worth a potential confrontation with a stranger, right?
In some African nations, more than one-third of the population lives on less than one dollar a day.
Almost 700 million people (8.5 percent of the world's population) live on less than $2.00 per day.
Nearly half the world lives on less than $8.00 per day.
To an alleged billionaire, a dollar is 1/1,000,000,000th of their fortune. Since 2020, billionaire “wealth” has increased by 81 percent to $18 trillion (they claim).
Despite the transparent corruption and inequality, those struggling to “make ends meet” will literally volunteer to die to keep the world “safe” for capitalism.
Meanwhile, just expressing this ^ is enough to bring down scorn upon oneself — not to mention ignorant comebacks like, “I suppose you prefer socialism.”
What a paucity of imagination…
Reminders:
To question capitalism is to recognize that we can have prosperity and abundance without surrendering compassion and cooperation.
It does not make you un-American (whatever that means), unpatriotic, communist, socialist, or Marxist.
It makes you empathetic, open-minded, curious, and imaginative enough to say: None of the above.
Who knows how many better options will arise if we finally expand our vision and stop viewing capitalism as our god?
I say we find out.
Some photos I recently took at Most Precious Blood Church in Astoria, Queens, NYC…
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The ties that bind have had some reallly good marketing