Thursday, January 03, 2008

Helping the worlds poor and terrorised

http://www.advicegoddess.com/archives/2008/01/your_inner_terr.html (Hat Tip: Instapundit)

This is quite hilarious. At some points I had to stop reading so I could tone down the belly laughs. But this last quote really got up my nose:

'Lest this sound trite, let me add that the mystic's love is not blind to the complication and suffering in the world. It is all-embracing, using the full human experience as fuel for the raging fire of awakening. Our modern lives are difficult. We face social injustices, environmental crises, war, economic imbalances, poverty, hunger, a vast array of suffering across our planet.'

One of the biggest problems in my view about writers like Stacy Lawson is that they DON'T have to 'face social injustices, environmental crises, war, economic imbalances, poverty, hunger' except in the most theoretical way. In her own words, these things are 'distant and separate'. Wherever she lives in the US, she is at this very moment warm, safe, overfed and by the rest of the worlds standards, immensely rich. For people who have spent a lot of time in poor countries, what is noticeable about poor people is the complete absence of overblown, mellifluous crap like Stacy's column. They don't have the time or the energy to create these steaming piles of horse excrement. I am embarrassed on Stacy's behalf, despite the fact that she declares herself so fervently as part of the grand 'we'. She is deluding herself- she is so far above the morass of the worlds poor and powerless she can't get a good grip on how far.

I vastly prefer in life the taciturn men who go to countries like Haiti, Kirgizstan and Bangladesh and help the poor with their engineering skills and know-how. A thousand thousand Stacy Lawsons don't contribute as much.

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