TOTALLY UNRELATED

You know when you've done something wrong that one way or another you'll suffer the consequences, right?  So if we know this as an individual, do we also know it as a nation? It occurs to me that the mess our nation even the world is in is the consequence of our collective misdeeds. Didn't we all get greedy somewhere along the way in the last ten years?

 

Two days ago I went shopping at Sam's Club and spent a chunk of money stocking up for just the two of us. There was a young boy and his little sister trying to buy eggs with a stack of quarters and they looked poor and hungry to me.  You can't shop at Sam's without a club card and the kids didn't have one so we worked it out with the cashier to let them use ours. I wouldn't take the change they offered for the eggs, they both thanked me and we parted ways. As my husband loaded the boxes of food we had just bought into the trunk of our car I began to cry. I've been poor before but it's been years ago and I was an adult not a kid.

Maybe the kids weren't poor, maybe they weren't hungry. Maybe I just imagined they were but I realized then that there are poor, hungry kids all around me and I haven't seen them. I haven't felt them but I feel them now. Question is, what am I going to do about it? If I feel them, isn't it my responsibility to do something? If the economic meltdown, the housing collapse, jobs and IRA's lost seems totally unrelated to hungry kids, then our elected officials,  all of us as a nation, as a world have a lot to answer for.