Messiahs of the poor. Who are the messiahs of the poor or has their plight become simply a sideshow for middle class society who, busy climbing the slippery pole of accreditation and consumerism are blind to the condition of others around them.
Once there were political movements with the broad aim of guiding society at large in such a way that the poor were part of the collective thought.
Today like the Victorian Peep Show, the poor in all their guises are simply something to gawk at, part of a documentary or worse, part of the stereotyping as the camera follows the lives of the disenfranchised and illiterate, washed up at 18 Not disenfranchised in terms of a vote but in terms of an education and the emotional stability to make their way through life.
We have become so convinced that given the right, 'get up and go', anyone can achieve some measure of success and if they don't they have only themselves to blame.
There are newspapers and media outlets that spend much of their time demonising the poor, trying to convince and warn us that if we don't follow the Milton Friedman plan we too will end up on the scrap heap.
Well sometimes it's a different scrap heap that awaits us, a scrap heap where we think we have everything but in fact we have nothing.
"It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God". This biblical saying has wide philosophical meaning and need not tie us down to the religious connotation.
Fulfilment is more than having obtained riches. Life has a human component which asks us to include everyone and to consider everyone as equal members of the human race, or to use another biblical quotation "do unto others as you would do unto yourself".
It is after all, Easter Sunday !
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