Paint and Pixels

Stuff that Matters: Chapter TWO of THREE:

The Pathetic Planet

As you will notice, this is chapter two in my "stuff that matters" series. However, blogger is not very condusive to succesive blogging, as it posts the most recent post first. Thus, in order to read my posts in the intended order, you must make sure you back track and read "chapter one" first, if you have not already.

In a gigantic grand stadium, there is a gathering of galaxies. Among the hundreds of billions of galaxies gathered there, there exists one particularly freckled galaxy, and on that one galaxy, is one tiny freckle, so miniscule that we must look at it under a microscope in order to see its features. It is round, and blue, and brown and green. On one side of it gathers a peculiar breed of people….

These people are hard to understand. They are complicated and babble about things like “economics” and “politics”, but none of that is understandable. What we do know is that they are wealthy. Of all the wealth that exists, they have almost all of it. But they have just as many real needs as all the rest of the people that exists. And after they have taken care of their needs, they still have a lot of money left over. And everyone wants that money. So some of the more clever ones among them, create more needs for those people to spend their money on. They come up with gadgets and toys like toe separators and onion choppers and flying saucers. Then they take pretty pictures of them and mail them to the other people, who look at the stuff and decide if they want it or not. They record beautiful people using the beautiful stuff and then show it on televisions so that the other people can decide whether or not they want the stuff. And they spend millions of dollars to package up the stuff really fabulously, even though the other people are just going to throw away the packaging, into their trash bags that get put into a trash truck and taken to a big trash place where all the trash accumulates- billions of dollars of trash. And when the people get tired of the stuff they bought it goes to that place too- the trash pile. But inevitably, not all of it makes it to the trash pile. Some if it falls out of the trash bag, or the trash truck, and eventually ends up in a gigantic floating island of trash in the middle of the ocean, where there is also a community of billions of dollars of trash.

A special time of year is coming up. It is called Christmas. At this time of year, these people get extra excited about buying the stuff for other people. In fact every one of these people is expected to buy a thing for everyone else. They will spend 450 billion dollars buying each other really pretty stuff, so that everyone will know that everyone loves each other. Each one of these people is estimated to spend about $791 dollars, to keep this “stuff trading” tradition going. The extra thrifty ones may spend about half that much and they will be very proud of themselves for finding stuff for cheaper prices. And most likely, within a year, most of that beautiful stuff will have found its way to the ever growing trash pile, and at that point the people will start searching for new, prettier stuff.

But on that same little world, not too far away, across an ocean, past the trash island, exists another type of people. They don’t have the same wealth as other ones, but they have the same basic needs. They need what every person needs to survive- clean water. And when they don’t have clean water, they drink dirty water, because that’s all they have. But the dirty water that they drink to survive is killing them- 42,000 of them die every week after they get sick from drinking the dirty water, in fact, it’s the most common reason anyone on the planet dies. About 38,000 them are children. Children who are loved by parents, brothers and sisters, and friends. $20 is what is would cost to give one of them clean water for the rest of their life- but they don’t have it. $20 is what it would cost to save a life. But they don’t have it, so they continue to die.

These two peoples know about each other, but they can’t see each other. The ocean between them is too big, and they can’t see that far. So on one side of the world, the stuff cycle continues, and on the other side, the death cycle continues. And, I have to ask, how could a good God let this happen? How could a good God look down on this planet and see a mother holding her child as he dies, and know that she is experiencing the most excruciating pain anyone can experience, and let that happen?

More on what you can do to help this seemingly pathetic planet coming soon…