Our values.

Life, is a sexually transmitted disease !!

A graffiti sign scrawled on a wall pleads for the poverty of ambition, the hopelessness of so many people out there trying to keep head above water. 

Money the lingua franca, the bridge, the vehicle by which we negotiate our life's journey. 

Without it we are nothing on the social barometer. But what of the inherent worth we all have which is not on display but is deep within all of us. Is the laid back existence of a person living in a village within the Solomon Islands worse off than the busy busy Wall St Banker with his next deal to broker whilst the last is still hanging over his head. 

The speed and the 'instant opportunity experience' that global economics has opened up has flushed out the values society used to value so highly. We have so much, and value so little. 

When one considers the influence the media has as it exposes, for a while a new horror for us to gawk at and then, when it's time is up the searchlight moves away leaving the tragedy to play its self out as best it can. 

What happened to Ebola. Did they find a cure. Are the camps still filling with the dying. Do we care ?

Of course we have our own personal tragedies to deal with, they may be small and insignificant but to us, in the moment they are huge and as we negotiate our daily response to misfortune we can be equally heroic as the brave medics left behind in the disease ridden camps in Guinea but it is this fragility which faces us all on which we should reflect.  

Life is not a gimme and yet do we take it 'too' seriously. Given the wide ranging condition that mankind finds himself in, some would find being or not being a pretty cruel joke. 

The boarder line between life and death in Somalia is insignificant, "you go to sleep alive and wake up dead" and yet we in the security of our three score and ten (out of date, four score) do not value what the dying Ethiopian simply has no way of comprehending. 

Perhaps we put too much value on being alive. We give ourselves up each night for sleep, a sleep in which we have little or no memory (in some-ways a few hours of death), on the assumption that we will wake. Would it be so bad if we didn't ? Would we be worse off without the stress and worry, the aches and pains, the unrequited communication ?