Jealousy

You know, I was recently thinking about how my privileged first world, relatively free and somewhat wealthy life must appear to my fellow human beings who might be underprivileged or poor or persecuted. The fact is, if you live in a typical developed or industrialized nation, there's a pretty good chance that you have greater wealth, abundance and freedom than kings and queens of old would have experienced. And there's also a pretty good chance that, and please don't be offended by this, you share far less of those riches, blessings and belongings than you actually could. I know I'm guilty of that. Well, recently I realized this type of wealth inequality contributes greatly to the hard crimes like theft and murder and vandalism that blue collar criminals often commit from what is often deemed as a lower social class. So why do I say that? Well, imagine for a moment that you're dirt poor. Your throat is parched from lack of water. You have painful, debilitating stomach cramps from hunger. You sleep on a dirty concrete floor under a bridge. But one day you wander past a television screen in a shop window and you see on the screen a privileged upper class, happy, smiling family with their hair all neatly combed, dressed to the nines and enjoying some lovely feast around a giant dinner table. Worse yet, perhaps you see a pile of uneaten food dumped into their trash can while their dogs feast upon rib eye steak scraps under the table. Something inside you recoils in disgust as you grind your teeth and you think, why? Why can't they share? How could they be so insensitive, so ignorant, so selfish, so evil? This jealousy and bitterness and anger festers inside you until one day you make a decision to break into one of these rich people's cars, vandalize them, steal a purse. Perhaps it gets worse. Maybe you wander into one of those fancy homes or mansion one day with a dangerous weapon so you can take what you need to survive, since you know they have way more than they need anyways. Definitely not sharing. Well, see what I mean here? I often wonder how much less crime there would be if we watched ourselves living our own lives as though we were ourselves poor or underprivileged. If we all did that, what would we be thinking about ourselves? Particularly in terms of how we share our wealth or our food or our belongings, the extent to which we live in luxury, and how much we go out of our way to engage in charity and community service for those in need. Now, I'm no epidemiologist or anthropologist, but I'm hazarding a guess that we folks who have been blessed with wealth could solve a lot of the world's crime problems by simply following the golden rule a whole lot more and sharing a whole lot more of what we have. So let me ask you this. What can you share today?

It.