Sometimes it doesn’t seem as if the human race has much to
recommend it. From a certain perspective, it's a dirty, anarchistic world. Countries
are trillions in debt but they manage to borrow more money. Politicians lie and
cheat the people they're supposed to be representing. Bankers destroy economies
and get rewarded for it. Individuals' lives are ruined when they can't make a
couple of payments on their mortgage or credit cards.
A pregnant woman in India gets wrongfully convicted of
murder and stuck in jail for 19 years because she couldn't put together the $180
bail money. Hundreds of thousands of people languish in prison for years - some
for most of their lives - without being charged.
Another woman commits a federal crime, is prosecuted and
found guilty but escapes prison, gets a new identity, lives a decent life for
dozens of years until she's caught but she gets off with a good lawyer. Yet
another woman commits a lesser crime but can't afford a clever lawyer and her
life is over. It's possible that race has something to do with it, because
although on the surface it's coincidence that the one who gets to live the rest
of her life as a free woman is white and the other one is black, it's no
coincidence that most of the wealth, resources and opportunity have
historically been available to whites and not to blacks in that country.
People are tried, condemned and executed on insufficient
grounds unless you count the grounds of some DA or police department needing to
bump up stats. Corporations that produce arms control politicians who create
wars out of nothing and get away with it.
Upstanding members of a community and various business men
who wear suits and who everybody respects get to screw around with a woman's
fledgling business, sexually harass her, contribute to the destruction of that
business and get away scot free while she picks herself out of the gutter,
stumbles and falls, stumbles and falls. This time it's not about race because
they're all white. Might be about gender, though. Partly it's about people who don't give a damn but mostly it's just about what
they know they can do and what she doesn't know she's allowed to do.
It's not hard to get totally bitter and twisted about the
way things are. Yet in the face of such overwhelming evidence that the human
race has nothing recommend it, some of us - maybe even most of us - still
believe that good conquers evil; that everybody has something within them that
nobody can touch or assail. That the darkest hours actually contain the
light.
That it's possible to climb out of the gutter even when you
don't know how and things look hopeless for you. It's possible to retrieve your
life no matter how much anybody's screwed you around, no matter how much the
odds seem - and are - stacked against you.
We believe it's possible to turn your life around when it
seems too late, that help is always at hand in reality; that we just have to
learn how to see it. Because no matter how bad things look and are in the world
people are fighting back. And conquering. Bankers are investigated eventually
as are banks for illegal home repossessions. In a world that’s tailor made for the worst kind of criminals, when profits
from child pornography and crime to the tune of $6 billion are laundered
through shadowy cyber organizations they actually get caught.
Corrupt systems and rulers fall apart. When you have lousy
entitlement and self esteem you can get help and rebuild until you're very
clear about what people can and can't do in your presence and to you.
And in a country
with so much poverty it's blinding to the soul, a young boy, Vijai Kumari, who was born in
prison and spent his life being shunted around juvenile homes because his
mother is unjustly and unnecessarily in prison, grows up straight somehow. Somehow
learns a skill and gets a job. Miraculously saves and saves until he has the
money to pay for a lawyer to get his mother released. And he succeeds.
