Much has been said and done regarding the plight of the poor, the
oppressed, the working-class. And this seems reasonable; North America, and
indeed the world is filled with people forced to work for food, with little
money left over after they have covered basic living expenses. It is a trap,
to be sure, and one that is difficult to break out of. The simple truth is
that there is not enough money to go around. There are too many people in the
world, and a shortage of food and other resources to supply them all.
  Most solutions have been political or practical in nature, centering on
ideas like government aid to give more money to these people, community
efforts to stock food for people who cannot afford it, or attempts by the
working-class themselves to gain money in unconventional ways. All of these
ideas have merit, but perhaps they treat only a few individual cases of the
disease, rather than attacking the underlying problem. The world seems to
have lost sight of the fact that by and large, the plight of people is a
problem of mindsets. And not only this, but the problematic minds might not
be limited to the rich people who are oppressing those poor blue-collar
workers.
  This point has occurred to me many times, but was quite forcefully
illustrated by a recent newspaper article I saw in which a group of factory
workers, which had split the buying of some lottery tickets among themselves,
won several million dollars. After splitting the take equally, each person
ended up with approximately one million. The interesting part was in reading
what each person said they were planning to do with the money. The responses
were all among similar lines: They spoke of how they intended to buy a house,
or pay the mortgage they currently had; They wanted to pay for their
children's education, and many of them said they intended to do a lot of
traveling, visiting relatives in far-away places. All of these things would
be nice, no doubt, but it could be pointed out that these goals are all
focused on the winners themselves. Out of about a dozen factory employees, I
did not see one whose plans for the money involved doing something good for
the state of the world. Obviously, it could be said that these people had
earned a good vacation, since some of them had no doubt been working hard at
that factory for years, but it seems to show a basic point: The working-class
aren't necessarily any less selfish than the rich. They just don't have
wealth to use on themselves.
  All across the nation, there are people who, if suddenly given a million
dollars, would likely spend it gleefully on luxuries, things which would not
be useful or helpful to others. Is there something wrong with that, some may
ask? If you suddenly had a lot of money, what's wrong with using it to buy a
nice house and car? It seems harmless enough at first, but I cannot help but
think back to the question of mindsets, and once one does so, one realizes
that this kind of mindset is exactly what made those people poor and forced
to toil for a living in the first place. The desire to spend as much money as
possible on one's own gratification is precisely what has made money a scarce
commodity in this world.
  So what can be done about this? It seems to me that people need to start
thinking more about how they think, and not concentrate quite as much on
where the money is going. As I say, the problem is one of mindsets, and as
long as people will be willing to spend millions on a simple luxury which
they do not need, the world will always be a place of strange injustices.
This means that people need to change how they think; Yes, there should be
more money to the poor, but it would not be helpful until they are educated
to realize just how fragile the balance of this world is, and how crucial it
is to everyone involved that the money you do get is spent wisely. Then and
only then can the world hope to become a better place.
  The revolution starts in the mind.