Where in the World Is...

We are geographically challenged. But, the planet is round, so how lost can you get? If you stepped off the world for 24 hours, you'd land back in the same place. What goes around, comes around - in the literal sense.

Catching a plane every now and again doesn't change the fact that, for the most part, we are geologically "fixed." A great majority of the world's human population spends a great majority of their lives within a microscopic portion of the planet. This tiny portion of terra firma appears flat and the mind translates that vision as finite, edged, with boundaries. It's a visual thing. Stay within and you won't fall off - you are safe.

The population is dense in some areas, sparse in others; but inherently, it is the same worldwide. Our existence is the same, worldwide. We all need food, shelter, a sense of safety, and belonging and acceptance. All is confirmed by the input of our five senses.

What excites the imagination and empathy is the visual input. "You have to see it to believe it." News of WWII began to precede movies, and images of severe starvation of death camps brought a very different mass reality into our consciousness than ever before. Now, that mass reality is instantaneous with the global Internet, and we are now able to expand our awareness far beyond the physical environment we inhabit. Our boundaries (and our safety?) have dramatically dimmed.

Those images are the source of feeling badly. Images give us something to relate to. It's too easy to imagine and empathize with the victims of tragedies if we can see them:

"When disasters strike or emergencies occur, people are motivated to help for a variety of reasons, mostly they feel badly for the victims… In order to deal with that negative feeling they're experiencing, one way to alleviate that is to help that person out of that plight." (Jeanna Bryner)

The world is shared, our experiences shared, our emotions are shared across the board. The world sobbed with us to mourn the 3,000 that died during 9/11. Countries stepped up to the plate when Hurricane Katrina hit our coastline. Yet, we do nothing as we continually watch much wider, greater devastation in Myanmar and China; though to help, to be the world power, has always been the tooting horn of the United States.

To step in and help now, unconditionally, would go far in healing many wounds. Why haven't we? Where in the world is our humanity now?