Blog Action Day 08 ~ Seeing Poverty

AziMuth

I’m pretty sure that many folks will provide excellent action plans throughout the blogosphere on addressing poverty.  What I’d like to add to this data bloom is a personal challenge I’ve undertaken, and invite you to consider it for your practice.  Where are the root causes within us?  

Seeing poverty is intimately tied to my start in blogging. It has to do with the unconscious manner I, and society as a whole, devise ways to hide from view all it doesn’t wish to see.  Jung taught how all the things we repress continue to exist outside our awareness in an unconscious region he called the shadow.   I used this quote just the other day, but its relevance here remains.  Marie von Franz writes “To have the courage to accept a quality which one does not like in oneself, and which one has chosen to repress for many years, is an act of great courage.  But if one does not accept the quality, then it functions behind one’s back.”  

So here’s my poverty attitude plan:

Take time each month to challenge my seeing habits by altering my travel habits.  Drive down the streets I avoid.  Go grocery shopping with the seniors living solely on social security.  Go watch the reclamation activity around the public dump.  Ask the Franciscan Friar in our community if I can join him as he delivers the food the store could no longer sell.  Take seriously my own wastefulness.  

All social change is rooted in attitude change.  It’s absolute bunk for any individual to let themselves off the hook.  With our attitudes we either contribute to the problem or the solution.  What’s great about Blog Action Day is that it’s a synchronized frontal assault on our awareness.  As the poet Charles Olson wrote “Polis is Eyes.”  

Any other suggestions you can add that might help correct our vision?