Give A Shit?

i was talking to a friend today and in due course of the conversation i was making a forceful case for my belief in universal health care and the failure of successive american governments to apply a workable solution to the medicare issues there. this i do every single time with the same conviction that every human has the right to health. and thus follows what better a case to examine than the most powerful and richest democracy in the world. at some point my friend probably lost patience and broke the silence and my soliloquy to say something that rather puzzled me. you know that everyone has one or two of those things that they strongly believe in and feel the need to criticise or defend, but you just seem to have a problem with evey single thing in the universe.

well may be i do. i do agree that for sometime now i have had time aplenty to while away doing nothing but entertaining a lot ideas, some interesting and others plain trash. and also i do realise that maybe i have made it a fashion to just go down defending a standpoint when afterwhile it would probably be more mature to learn rather than be stubborn. somethings i definitely need to work on.

but what worries is the fact that more and more people around me seem to be more absorbed with their own petty existence. i say petty not because they are but because of what becomes of them. i feel that in today's world more time is spent in the pursuit of one's own guarded welfare
that even a mere thought toward the greater implications of our actions are considered a waste
of time. i may be wrong assuming this but it is an observation which is appearing with an increasing frequency.

i am stickler. for a lot of things at that. and i do like to entertain thoughts on matters well beyind my control becuase i believe thats what leads to discussion and probably change. i am often accused of several things, increasingly favourite among which is the habit i have formed of trying to constantly highlight the need for all of us, specially my peer group and the generations that follow, to start applying some kind of a reality check on our goals and ambitions.

reality check? well simply that we all want riches yet how many of us are willing to be responsibly rich. i support that there is nothing wrong in rightfully earning one's fortune and then even rightfully spending it. but often the lines between comfort, luxury and stupidity are becoming thinner. it is now hard discern what is a need, want, desire and whim. the strata of needs and desires have been long surpassed. these are the times of the whimsical buffoons. golf carts to ride around your house, plasma tvs in every room, multiple exotic cars, private jets etc. once the domain of the capitalist leech, these are now the aspirations of the broader many.

simple things amount to a bigger change. if only each one of us could ask of ourselves that in this rat race to the fancy desired life, can we do something within reach to better those less fortunate around as well.

i am compelled to rethink what i choose. because in its own way small or big, my luxury of choice can potentially do some greater good.

i dream. i desire. for me. for us.