It's Worse Than You Think: Halftime Between Two Lost Decades

[bhikkhu]

4. "the best we can do is to care about the least among us"

...is definitely something to keep in the forefront. I think one big problem we have has little to do with what percent we are or what party or even in the presence or lack of compassion, but the lack of a simple physical sense of how much is enough. Enough food, enough money, enough clothes, enough that we can relax about needing more, enough that we can afford to be generous. Every generation we get bigger and richer and have more stuff, and the rest of the natural world gets squeezed a little harder into a shrinking corner. If our share of the planet's resources stop growing, so be it.

I tell my kids that we live in the wealthiest nation on earth (more or less) in the most prosperous time in all of recorded human history - so if I won't buy them that Kinect or the Disneyland vacation (or whatever the necessary thing of the moment is), we're still pretty much ok in the grand scheme of things. We live right around poverty level but we are ok, and I'm employed; its not that someone is keeping stuff from us, its that we don't need much else.