Those Evil One-Percenters
You know who's really evil? It's those rich, greedy 1%'ers. You know, the people who make too much money. Those people! They need to pay their fair share and be more generous. After all, they have enough....more than enough. Don't even start on how out of touch they are with the real world and what other people are going through.
Don't these 1%'ers just drive you nuts?!? You'd think they would act a bit more grateful for what they have. Instead, they always seem so entitled and disconnected from the plight of the others.
Don't even get me started on their giving (or lack thereof). Instead of giving to those in need, they buy newer cars, moreTVs, faster phones, better vacations, and bigger houses.
I had several more paragraphs of anti-rich ranting to go, but there's just one problem. It's so easy to point the finger at others when we can perceive them a certain way. We have the privilege of judging them from our safe little perch of morality and relativism.
Unfortunately, we're looking through the wrong lens. It's easy to look through the lens of our own choosing. Doing so allows us to justify our attitude, judgment, and inaction. Here's the real, sobering, hard-to-swallow truth: If your household makes more than $40,000 USD each year, you're in the top 1% of families in the world. Do you make more than forty grand? If so, you're a 1%'er.
Let that sink in. Ouch. We're rich. Clean water, electricity, heat, A/C, education, medicine, cars, Tvs, cell phones, internet, refrigeration, three meals per day. We're very, very rich. It doesn't seem like it because we live in our own bubbles surrounded by people richer than our version of rich, but we're so unbelievably blessed. As such, there are really only three rational implications of this reality:
We should live with gratitude.
We should live with contentment.
We should live with generosity.
Anything short of this takes us down the road of becoming real-life versions of those rich people we so harshly (and unfairly) judge.
I hope you have a blessed day.
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