Blog Action Day: Poverty

Today, nearly 9000 bloggers around the world, reaching over nine million readers, are writing about poverty as part of Blog Action Day. (Since publishing this, now over 10,000 bloggers writing, reaching over eleven million readers.)

The sort of poverty I’m going to write about is probably something that is only possible in the West. It is the sort of poverty that requires a certain amount of luxury first. It’s a poverty we are privileged to have, and I hesitate slightly to write about it in the face of the sort of grinding physical poverty so many millions across the world experience every day.

Disconnection

What I’m writing about today is the poverty of disconnectedness.

We see it every day, many of us are part of it: hoardes of people travelling in rush hours in big cities around the world, together yet separate from each other. Arriving to work at what are often meaningless jobs, wearing our masks to protect ourselves. Living in our apartments or houses, with family or alone, not knowing our neighbours’ names.

Now you probably think I’m going to recommend that we all get chatting with our fellow-commuters, be ourselves at work and invite our neighbours round for coffee.

Protecting our unnatural lives

Well maybe. But actually I think the malaise is far deeper than that, and our disconnectedness is in many ways a band aid over the wound of our unnatural lives; it actually protects us. We don’t connect with strangers on our commute because we try to preserve a little space between home and work, or because we’re working on the journey. We don’t make friends with our neighbours because our real friends are scattered all over the world and we don’t want to get ’stuck’ with neighbours we don’t really like just because they’re physically close.

Even this online connection between us as bloggers, which I value so very much, is unnatural, but the irony is that we often find closer connections in this online community than in our offline lives.

Creating local communities

So what’s the answer?

I think it’s to do with living somewhere we feel at home (as far as possible) and getting involved in the local, face-to-face community, and working near our homes. We’re very individualistic, but it feels to me as if the human race has had to go through this phase of individualism to learn something, and now we need to get back to living in common with others, as we’ve done since the beginning.

My own life has improved so much since I started working part-time, but I still trek into London three days a week, which means a weekly total of 12 hours’ commuting. For now, this continues to suit me, but I’m trying to get involved in more local groups, and get out and about more in the town where I live.

We talk a lot in the UK about villages dying because the local shops are priced out by supermarkets, and about towns where weekend nights are punctuated by drunken violence. It’s all part of the same disconnect.

Spiritual connection

We’re disconnected from our spirituality as well. Too much of our religious experience (if we have it at all) is to do with rules and expected behaviour. We are living in a time of fear, and many faith communities unfortunately respond to that by tightening the rules and pulling up the drawbridge rather than reaching out to others.

All of which understandably puts off people who feel a deep pull towards the spiritual but don’t understand how to express it. Or conversely it attracts those who are looking for safety in the rigidity of dogma.

If we consciously connect with others, we can share our experiences of everyday sacredness and reinforce our connection with the divine as well as with each other.

Simplicity

And we can enable ourselves to do all this if we live more simply. If we’re always chasing our tails trying to make enough money to buy the latest gadgets we become, to use a current expression cash rich, time poor. (Can you imagine living in a community where this concept would be meaningless, because they live in desperate poverty every day? That’s why I hesitated to write this post.)

The current financial crisis will force us to take another look at our expenditure, and is likely to bring more material poverty to countries with ‘mature’ (huh!) financial markets. But what if we pre-empt it? What if we take a serious look at what is really necessary to live our lives with joy, and get rid of the excess? Won’t that allow us the freedom to reach out and really connect with others on many levels?

Connecting with real poverty

And I think our own disconnectedness means we can’t really connect on any deep level with those in real physical poverty. Yes we feel compassion for ‘them’ but it’s always ‘them’ isn’t it? Somewhere removed from ‘us’.

My belief is that by losing our own disconnection, we can make a difference to those in poverty by reaching out, breaking down barriers, and aligning ourselves with everyone in the world. We’ll be able to connect both locally and globally and facilitate real change.

What do you think?

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