4: Interconnectedness
Achieve consensus around the interconnectedness of the wealthy and the poor Other Information:
When we talk about wealth and poverty in America, we should also talk about separation and segregation. This means you may
be in a particular class and not even really have any idea about it because you're never exposed to anything different. In
the United States, the communities of wealth are isolated from impoverished communities in a more substantial way than in
other countries. In some countries, you might have a lot of money but every day you walk down the street and interact with
twenty people who are in poverty, so you are in it and used to it. It's a day to day reality. And in some other countries
there is this division, so that separation of our various communities is something that we have as a barrier to actually trying
to work with this issue. How do we overcome this barrier so that we can work on it? When we focus on money, we fear that things
might get harder, so we tend to just take care of our piece of the world: our family and our neighborhood. When things are
going wrong in these areas, we just focus on taking care of ourselves. To make it even worse, modern technology gives us plenty
of opportunity to sacrifice real connection and substitute it with an ever-glowing iPhone screen. So what do we lose by focusing
only on money? How can we reclaim what we've lost? This is a philosophical question but also a practical one. How do we change
it so it doesn't revert? How do we change it at the root, not just address symptoms, so that we create a system that prevents
poverty instead of one that tries to cure it after the fact? How do we break the illusion that the impoverished are The Other
and show the reality that we are all one community that functions in unison? Although the wealthy and the impoverished are
deeply interconnected, it is often hard to see that interconnectedness because the very way our society functions seeks to
render this connection invisible. For example, take the clothing that we are wearing: we don't see where it comes from at
all. The same is true with the meat that we buy in our stores -- it is just there provided for us; we don't know the process
that it took to get it. These days, we see the stories of separation increasing, and a greater polarization is taking place.
So we are longing for a consensus around the interconnectedness of everyone, and we are longing for more visibility.
Objective(s):
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