From the Editor: Let's share our resources

From the Editor: Let's share our resources

This is the good NEWS – Ed.

While human beings are social animals, living in close proximity to one another is not always a piece of cake. Let us not forget that we are earth’s super-predators. There is no one higher up the food chain to keep our numbers in check, so we turn on one another instead, or even worse, we take out our frustrations on defenceless animals. Or both…

The level of violence in this country, and indeed the world, is frightening. We are killing each other for greater control over the resources. Indeed, we are rapidly destroying the very earth itself through our uncontrollable greed.

Looking back on this pandemic year which came at us from the left field, a lesson that many of us thought we’d learnt during the first weeks of lockdown, just a year ago, was that we could live quite comfortably without all the ‘stuff’ with which we surround our lives and homes. Yet, as lockdown lifted, it took many of us no time at all to revert to our old habits of mass consumerism, while poverty continued to escalate across the country.

And instead of nurturing the spirit of human kindness that characterised our response to the crisis, to a large extent we have given up loving our neighbour and resorted to squabbling amongst ourselves at best, or murdering one another at worst.

Take the matter of baboons, for example. Is it because their habits are so similar to our own, that we can’t find a way to live with them? If food is easily available, they will take it, just like us. The only difference is that they share it amongst themselves and don’t waste it; neither do they decide to chase us over the mountains or even euthanise us, so that they can have more for themselves.

Many of us have decided to live in this beautiful part of the country because we love being close to nature, but when nature strolls through the open door, we scream and run for our shotguns. And then, on top of it, we fight with one another about how to deal with the problem.

With our huge brains, surely we can find a less confrontational means of finding a win-win solution.

Similarly, when the economy starts to pick and ‘we’re all right, Jack,’ why do we so quickly forget about the inequality on our doorstep? One thing Covid should have hammered home to us is the fact that we are one community and what affects the most vulnerable of us, affects us all. If for no other reason than our own survival, it is absolutely imperative that we find a way to share our resources with the less fortunate. And with our big brains, we can.