What's Crazier?
Excerpt from The Irresistible Revolution by Shane Claiborne:
The good-humored teacher and street-corner prophet Peter Maurin, cofounder of the Catholic Worker movement, put it this way: "If we are crazy, then it is because we refuse to be crazy in the same way that the world has gone crazy."
What's crazy is a matter of perspective. After all, what is crazier: one person owning the same amount of money as the combined economies of twenty-three countries, or suggesting that if we shared, there would be enough for everyone? What is crazier: spending billions of dollars on a defense shield, or suggesting that we share our billions of dollars so we don't need a defense shield? What is crazier: maintainging arms contracts with 154 countries while asking the world to disarm its weapons of mass distruction, or suggesting that we lead the world in disarmament by refusing to deal weapons with over half of the world and by emptying the world's largest stockpile here at home? What's crazy is that the US, less than 6 percent of the world's population, consumes nearly half of the world's resources, and that the average American consumes as much as 520 Ethiopians do, while obesity is declared a "national health crisis." Someday war and poverty will be crazy, and we will wonder how the world allowed such things to exist. Some of us have just caught a glimpse of the beauty of the promised land, and it is so dazzling that our eyes are forever fixed on it, never to look back at the ways of that old empire again.
The good-humored teacher and street-corner prophet Peter Maurin, cofounder of the Catholic Worker movement, put it this way: "If we are crazy, then it is because we refuse to be crazy in the same way that the world has gone crazy."
What's crazy is a matter of perspective. After all, what is crazier: one person owning the same amount of money as the combined economies of twenty-three countries, or suggesting that if we shared, there would be enough for everyone? What is crazier: spending billions of dollars on a defense shield, or suggesting that we share our billions of dollars so we don't need a defense shield? What is crazier: maintainging arms contracts with 154 countries while asking the world to disarm its weapons of mass distruction, or suggesting that we lead the world in disarmament by refusing to deal weapons with over half of the world and by emptying the world's largest stockpile here at home? What's crazy is that the US, less than 6 percent of the world's population, consumes nearly half of the world's resources, and that the average American consumes as much as 520 Ethiopians do, while obesity is declared a "national health crisis." Someday war and poverty will be crazy, and we will wonder how the world allowed such things to exist. Some of us have just caught a glimpse of the beauty of the promised land, and it is so dazzling that our eyes are forever fixed on it, never to look back at the ways of that old empire again.
posted by Elizbeth at 8:52 PM
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