Reality Shows, OMG!

I want to talk about FEAR and how carrying fear impairs all our functions. I expect that anyone reading this know this. After I lived in El Salvador, I was afraid of being hungry. I was Scarlet O'Hara from Gone With the Wind. "I will never go hungry again." And I was a privileged Norte Americana. I got to leave El Salvador and Guatemala and go back to Marblehead MA, USA where the day I arrived, I was invited to eat lobster on a beautiful yacht.

I also had a hedge in Salvador, one of many, in that I had a jar of Spiralina that my friends Steven and Eunice had given me. So, when there was no food in the village, I could boil some water and have a vitamin filled drink. No one else could. When we were trying to get to a town to communicate about an assassination (I was with a nun who gave her life to this village) and we were riding in the back of a French donated pick up truck riddled with bullet holes, the truck stopped when we saw a cow in the field (donated by Heifer International) and the 30 or so men crammed into the back of the truck and hanging off the sides, each went to the field and took one blast of milk from the cow's udder.

The mood in the truck changed and everyone was happy for a moment. My reaction when I got home was to eat a lot. I gained a lot of weight. I couldn't control the notion that eating a lot would stave off hunger. Not true, but hard to fight initially. I can understand on so many levels how the have-nots come to want to hoard for the future. It can be an unexamined pathology. It was with me. I hated being hungry. In Chiapas, Mexico, in the Highlands of Guatemala, in El Salvador, I experienced hunger. Millions of people experience it every day without the lobster dinners to come home to.

The reality show "Hoarders" shows the pathology full blown and horrific. It shows depression, fear, and ultimately the possibility of death from things. Often food is hoarded. The opposite shows are the shows of sick, often ugly, consumption. "The Housewives of Miami", "The Housewives of New Jersey" and so on.  The obscene dedication to selfish desires, more face lifts, more Botox, more house remodels, more arguments, more men, more, more, more... Millions of people watch voyeuristically as inhuman dramas play out. Is this a sign the Rome is Burning while we are, like Nero, playing the fiddle?

Mas manana. I think this is important. I need to sort some things out and this is helping me.