Not living in the ghetto

Here's an interesting paragraph from a book by Bill Strickland called Make the Impossible Possible.
I don't know a lot about the book, except that it's motivational in style, and has the subtitle: One man's crusade to inspire others to dream bigger and achieve the extraordinary, which should give you an idea of its content.

One Man's Crusade to Inspire Others to Dream Bigger and Achieve the Extraordinary - See more at: http://www.powells.com/biblio/9780385520553?&PID=25646#sthash.aq2dCOLD.dpuf

One Man's Crusade to Inspire Others to Dream Bigger and Achieve the Extraordinary - See more at: http://www.powells.com/biblio/9780385520553?&PID=25646#sthash.aq2dCOLD.dpuf

One Man's Crusade to Inspire Others to Dream Bigger and Achieve the Extraordinary - See more at: http://www.powells.com/biblio/9780385520553?&PID=25646#sthash.aq2dCOLD.dpuf

 

One Man's Crusade to Inspire Others to Dream Bigger and Achieve the Extraordinary - See more at: http://www.powells.com/biblio/9780385520553?&PID=25646#sthash.aq2dCOLD.dpuf

I rarely tried to imagine what it might be like to live in other neighbourhoods. I couldn't imagine any place, in fact, besides Manchester and the ghetto that surrounded me. That myopic worldview never worried me when I was young. I simply didn't know any different. But now I know I had fallen for the deadliest lie the ghetto uses to shrink your soul - that your world is the whole world; that your future, and all the sorry possibilities life will ever offer you, are already right before your eyes.

Incidentally, the Manchester he's talking about here is in the States, not the UK. 

Heaven

Boughton says he has more ideas about heaven every day. He said, 'Mainly I just think about the splendours of the world and multiply by two. I'd multiply by ten or twelve if I had the energy. But two is much more than sufficient for my purposes. ' So he's just sitting there multiplying the feel of the wind by two, muliplying the smell of the grass by two. 'I remember when we put that old wagon on the courthouse roof,' he said. 'Seems to me the stars were brighter in those days. Twice as bright.'

From Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson, page 147 Picador edition 2007

The Great Unspoken

What's the great unmentionable in human society? Sex, nah. Death, nah. These are both talked about everywhere. We just pretend they're not.
The great unmentionable is defecation, and its companion, urination. Okay, the second of those two occasionally gets a mention in public life, but the first is mostly viewed as something no one actually does.
Why am talking about this then? Because I've just seen a review of a book called The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters. It's written by Rose George, and was published by Metropolitan Books, back in October this year.
More than 6 billion people have to deal with this (an anagram of shit, did you realise?) day in and day out, and in many parts of the world there just isn't the provision for it, which is why there's a great deal of disease, and so many deaths from diarrhea (I'm using the US spelling because I can never remember the English one.) According to the review (which is based on the book's stats), diarrhea kills a child every 15 seconds. Can this really be true? Perhaps it can, but it's certainly hard to comprehend.
The review, by Bill McKibben, on the Books & Culture site, is well worth reading (only a couple of pages.) It makes a book on a not-so-enticing subject enticing!

Blog Action Day 2008 Poverty

I've just been reading a whole pile of stats from the Technorati site on the state of blogging in the world. Okay, it's probably a little loaded in terms of the US, but Europe and Asia get a good look in too. (Australasia is lagging a bit behind, but perhaps we were already a day ahead when the survey was sent out?) Anyway, it's interesting to compare those stats with the ones available for the Blog Poverty Day. Here are some of the top facts:

• Almost half the world — over 3 billion people — live on less than $2.50 a day.
• The GDP (Gross Domestic Product) of the 41 Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (567 million people) is less than the wealth of the world’s 7 richest people combined.
• Nearly a billion people entered the 21st century unable to read a book or sign their names.
• Less than one per cent of what the world spent every year on weapons was needed to put every child into school by the year 2000 and yet it didn’t happen.
• 1 billion children live in poverty (1 in 2 children in the world). 640 million live without adequate shelter, 400 million have no access to safe water, 270 million have no access to health services. 10.6 million died in 2003 before they reached the age of 5 (or roughly 29,000 children per day).

These are tough stats, and sitting here blogging doesn't seem to be much of a way to reduce them. However, joining in this poverty action day is a start, and I recommend it to anyone else who blogs to get involved. It's not officially till the 15th of this month, but getting a head start won't matter, I'm sure.
These stats come from the Global Issues site, where there are plenty more shocking statistics.
Perhaps what's worst at the moment is the way the world's scrambling to save its wealth, when the money that's being put into saving it could save real live human beings - millions of them - around the world. Sad to say, greed still reigns supreme, especially in the US, where CEOs who do next to nothing for their livelihoods except pronounce what hundreds of real workers should do, bail out with millions of dollars in retirement funds. Well, they can't take it with them, and when they meet up with the poor in the world after death, I hope they have a good excuse for their behaviour.
Which doesn't mean that I'm less guilty because I don't happen to be in their shoes, though I do aim to help when I can.

Studdert Kennedy again

The world and the life of men have meaning and purpose. At its heart the world is not mad; but sane. That is the bare minimum of faith for man. It that goes, everything goes, and we can neither live nor think about life; but only take a long time to die.

G A Studdert Kennedy, in The Word and the Work, quoted in Woodbine Willie, by William Purcell, pg 208

Is this world our home?

At church on Sunday the person preaching talked about the book of Lamentations and its relevance for us as Christians today. That is, the sense of exile that the writer of Lamentations feels is one Christians share in this world, where things are plainly not right, and where evil abounds.
But to think of this world only as a place where we are refugees is to make it a place to hate. And whatever else it may be, it’s also the world God created, spinning in an enormous Universe, and decked out in such a fashion that there’s no end to its wonders.
This world fits us like a glove. There is no other known planet where we could survive. We match the nature of this world intimately. To see ourselves as exiles within it is to see it as a place to fight against, to be at cross-purposes with. But it’s not the world’s fault that things are at cross-purposes. St Paul writes in Romans about the whole of creation groaning as it waits its release from whatever it is that holds it at present.
To say, as the hymnwriter does (if I’m correct) that ‘this world is not our home’ is only partly true. This world is our home, but it’s only our temporary home. We’re expecting eventually to go to a place that’s even more our home than this one. That’s the difference.