lift others up

“When you plant lettuce, if it does not grow well, you don't blame the lettuce. You look for reasons it is not doing well. It may need fertilizer, or more water, or less sun. You never blame the lettuce. Yet if we have problems with our friends or family, we blame the other person. But if we know how to take care of them, they will grow well, like the lettuce. Blaming has no positive effect at all, nor does trying to persuade using reason and argument. That is my experience. No blame, no reasoning, no argument, just understanding. If you understand, and you show that you understand, you can love, and the situation will change”

                                                                                                         Thich Nhat Hanh

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Why is it

That so often those with the capacity to truly help others, don’t?

Why is it that the people with the most wealth

Are often the least generous?

It seems as if they had turned shaming and blaming into a fine art

And find every reason they can think of

To make the poor responsible for their plight

Just get a job

You are lazy moochers

If you worked harder you would succeed

The message is clear

“You are directly responsible for your plight!”

It is true, at times, that people have made mistakes

True at times that they are working the system

But what I hear echoing back from the poor

Is a plaintive protest

“I am trying as hard as I can”

And they are!

But in America, because of our worship of power and wealth

The system is against them

Wages are too low

Health insurance is too high, or unavailable

House is out of reach

Education is astronomical

It is harder to work your way out of poverty now, than at any other time in American history

And studies show that under Trump and the GOP, things are getting worse.

Jesus talked about the “little ones” a lot

He meant children

But not just children

The phrase might just as easily be interpreted

The least of these

What we are really talking about, is vulnerability

People made vulnerable by violence, trauma

Addiction, mental illness, poverty, oppression, minimization, ignorance

It is an American past time, at least by the right (I will not call them conservatives,

That is an insult to conservatives.  They are right wing ideologues who love power and dominance)

To shame and blame these people

To hypocritically remove services from them (claiming they don’t want to ‘enable’ them)

And at the same time minimizing and oppressing them

This does not work

It creates smugness on one side

And anger on the other

“Blaming has no positive effect at all,

nor does trying to persuade using reason and argument....

No blame, no reasoning, no argument, just understanding.

If you understand, and you show that you understand,

you can love, and the situation will change”

We are admonished by the Bible, to overcome evil with good

Maybe it is time we tried it

To love and understand those who are poor

Disenfranchised

To support, to nurture, to lift up

To curb out own desire to accumulate

For as someone said

“poverty exists not because we cannot feed the poor

But because we cannot satisfy the rich”

To curb our need to exercise power over others

To build ourselves up, by putting others down

And find that spot within us, that is kind, and generous

And lifts others up

Food and housing

Healthcare and education

Without these no one can flourish

But it takes more

Sometimes what a person needs to soothe their soul and ease their burden is the loving hand of a friend gently touching their heart and lifting them towards love