THE HUMAN CONDITION

If you look at the human condition, you cannot fail to be moved by the indescribable pain and suffering which many people undergo throughout the world. It is a dead conscience that will not be filled with anguish at the sight of starved and shriveled bodies, or the sight of innocent children disfigured and maimed by chemical weapons, or the sight of people who fight fir a patch of pavement on which to rest their head at night.

In anguish and even rage, you may well ask, for example, what help is there for:

· the millions of people in various parts of the world who face starvation and death as a result of famine, drought, or being driven out as refugees from their own homes?

· the millions of people who are uprooted from their ancestral homes through political conflict, racial violence, sectarian strife or the economic greed of plundering industrial nations?

· the health and quality of life of whole communities whose excreta flow in open drains around their shanty dwellings and whose children are infested with tapeworms and other debilitating and life-shortening diseases?

· the millions of street-children, boys and girls, who roam the megapolises of the world in search of scraps of food by day and shelter from the elements by night?

· people who toil on plantations engaged in producing cash-crops like sugar, cocoa, coffee, tobacco and cotton for a world market that is controlled by powerful manipulators of the futures markets and the stocks and shares capitals of the world?

· people who are burdened with debt and high-interest repayments on loans and who are still urged to go on high spending sprees on consumer items they do not really need?

· people whose rulers have squandered their wealth and pawned their resources to multinational companies, banks or arms dealers who thrive on human conflict and misery and who are subsidized and supported by the industrial giants of the world?

· these people whose rulers use these weapons of death and destruction not on their real enemies but for terrorizing and subjugating them?

· men, women and children in towns, villages and valleys who are besieged by a tyrannical government seeking to impose its own ideology and enforce its authority, who face persecution, oppression, torture and even death, and who are constantly hunted b the vigilant eyes of informers who may be their own fellow workers, students, or kith and kin?

· the millions of unemployed and underemployed both in the industrialized countries and in the impoverished countries of the world?

· people who lives are drowned in liquor, who fritter away their days in aimlessness and despair and whose families live in perpetual fear of physical violence and mental torture from their uncontrollably brutal ways?

· Communities living under the stranglehold of drug traffickers, of cocaine and crack, who would kill, rob, maim and impose their rule of fear and insecurity on that were once havens of peace and tranquility?

· people who are blinded by racism, nationalism or other forms of chauvinism who harass and persecute others solely because of the color of their skin?

· the materialists whose main concern is their standard of living and not of life as such, who regard their Creator as either non-existent or irrelevant and unnecessary to their concerns?

· the skeptics and the disillusioned of the modern world who have grown tired of crass materialism and consumerism and who are groping for a purpose and an identity?

· the flora and fauna of the finely balanced eco-systems of our global village which is being devastated by man’s greed and by highly efficient tools of exploitation and destruction?

And so you can continue asking such questions and adding to the catalogue of falsehood, evil, injustice and ugliness in our world.