Examining theft - to be continued

A white man told me today he’s had 10 bikes stolen over the past couple years.

I told him there’s another way to look at this: he was able to afford to buy 10 bikes over the past couple of years.

This was yet another reason I got in trouble at Occupy in D.C. when the 1% who came to pitch their tents & occupy the plaza were attempting to protect their resources from the 99% who called the plaza their homes during their daily lives.

Of course we all want to believe we are/were brought up 'poor', 'working class', anything but privileged. Yet we know if we have merely 4 things: a roof over our heads, food in the cupboard, shoes on our feet, clean water to drink, we are living among the top 5% of the world. If we add a car, clothes, electricity, we are in the top 1% of the world.

But we are busy looking at those with more then we have and wanting it, instead of comparing our lives with those that have less then we do and becoming committed and determined to STOP taking so much and to begin to share.

We need to re-examine 'theft' and rename it. The real 'theft' is the belief that it is not just okay but desirable to have more then others - really we rarely think about how much more then others we have, but we are more likely to think about those that have more then we have and how we can get some of that.

"Wealth" needs to be redefined as well, and here comes that old paradigm change I am promoting: the belief that it is wrong, immoral, anti-human to have more then any other human being on this planet. If we embraced this paradigm, we would have no need for jails, for our hyped up fears of someone 'stealing' from us, let alone for wars, occupations, military aggression, weapons, etc.etc.etc.

Let us redefine 'wealth' as the ability to share our mother earth's resources equitably, to find meaning and peace through the way we live our lives and not some 'spiritual' path we are on that allows us to continue on the material path that exploits the resources and destroys the lives of others while we seek an inner peace that can only come with our outer lives being one and the same.