Questions with no answers

I sometimes find it hard to say what I really want to say here and this is one of those days. However, I thought I could share some questions that keep coming to mind.

1. How can I have so much beauty and safety and peace and plenty in my life and so many have none of those things? I would like to be able to say I earned what I have but I don't think I worked any harder than most people and indeed, probably a lot less hard than many. I was born into a country that is peaceful (more or less). I was able to get educated and to find work. I had a caring family. But weren't those just the luck of the genetic draw? I could just as easily have been born in one of the many countries that lack schools, food, health care, security, basic necessary infrastructure. None of us has chosen the life we were born into.



2. How come we often don't seem to see the humanity in other people who are so different from us? How come we don't hear their dreams and hopes (if they have any left). How come we so often see people as our enemies - just because they don't see things the way we do. Maybe if we listened to one another we'd learn enough to live beautifully at peace with one another. Maybe...

What brought this on today? I was walking again by the lake on this beautiful, warm Autumn day. It was breathtaking and there were lots of people out just enjoying the day and the view. I don't imagine any of us was worried about being strafed by an airplane or blown up by a bomber or arrested for just being there. 

But just before that I had been watching a program from the BBC's Simon Reeve called The Tropic of Cancer. Simon is travelling around the Tropic of Cancer and so many of the places he visits are both beautiful and awful. I think of Bangladesh with its amazing people for most of whom, life is a daily struggle, where in order to survive a family must send even their 8 or 9 year old children to work. Do they deserve this? Then he made a short incursion into Burma and there we see a village that just wants to live at peace and there is constant intimidation by the army who kills people, kidnaps them, rapes the women just because these folks belong to a tribe that the government wants to get rid of. Aren't there situations like this everywhere?

After experiences like these - where I see contrasts that are so unjust I want it all to be made better right now. But it won't be. Even so, I have hope because every day I meet people who are good and kind and generous; people who work in many small and larger ways to overcome these injustices and who help me to want to do so too. But it is a long wait for those who suffer.