The word today is property. This is a test to see how well the idea might work. First some thoughts on the word followed by a photograph and ink drawing illustrating the word.
When I think of property, I think of ownership. The house I live in is owned by me because we have no mortgage on it. The dog has his rubber balls. My daughter has the cake she has chosen as treats. Property is key to how the western world thinks about wealth, owing things is what we are encourage to strive for whether a big house, new car, respected profession, a good pension. It is a very one dimensional way of looking at life. Property, ownership and money. When I read about how people want to protect what is theirs I cant help thinking that in reality we have very little if any ownership of our property. My house is built on land. Do I own that land? Probably in some sense, though maybe I don’t own the mineral rights to the land. Who gave me that right? Who decided that this land could be bought and sold? Having visited Canada this year and seen how much of land there is wild, how could anybody own all that territory? I don’t think we own the land, the water, the resources or anything else on this planet. We as humans take, strip, and use any resources we can find in order to gain more property, more wealth. We don’t think about the long term or even medium term consequences of our actions. Well we think but we ignore. It is more important to keep the economy going, to keep people in jobs, creating more things that we don’t need. Where is the vision for working towards our future, solving problems we can see coming now before we come to the crunch point? When we going to make more effort to solve climate change, antibiotic resistance, water poverty, food poverty, or any number of other things? We are not all the same. There are people working for change, working for improvement, but they seem to be in the minority. How do you get the average person to back you? To make a simple change to improve the life of the plant as a whole, not just the homeless person on their high street. I don’t know the answer but if that person is helping a homeless person, or feeding the wildlife in their garden, or fitting LED bulbs to reduce their power consumption, then at least they are doing something. Doing something to help the planet that no one of use own. The future is bleak for humankind but it isn’t without hope. It is just that that hope is sometimes hard to find.
Time taken: 17.5 minutes!
thistlethoughts 