It’s safe to say that to a person those reading this aren’t being abused, persecuted, jailed for their beliefs, or aren’t living under the hardships of civic strife and wars. We all enjoy basic freedoms of religion, speech, assembly. We can dislike our elected representatives and say so without reprisals. We enjoy a certain material well being too. We can count on sanitation, not only running water but running hot water, flushing toilets, electricity not only to compensate for the dark but to fuel the appliances and electronic gadgets we have come to rely on. We have the power to eat healthily and if we don’t, the onus is on us. In brief we start out the year better off than a number of millions who share the planet with us. Certainly all of us have problems and some of us have serious problems, but the context in which we struggle to deal with those problems is far easier and far less harsh than the one of so many who struggle with the same issues in far harder circumstances.
As the new year begins may we keep our perspective, may we be grateful not because it’s become trendy, but because we genuinely have more than many, people as human as we, who are as deserving as any of us.
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