America: Red, White and Blue Pills

Kudos to OKPartisan and a very moving post on her Blue Dot Blog. Having recently seen the Oscar-winning documentary, Born into Brothels, it was a reminder to her of how much Americans, by and large, are removed from the realities endured by the rest of the world.

OKPartisan writes about what she sees as Americans' penchant for a Matrix-constructed reality:

"A few years ago I went on a mission trip to Peru, where people live in shacks and lined up outside the clinic overnight for the chance to spend a few moments with a doctor. They were grateful even for a few ibuprofen pills and when we left hundreds were left waiting, unseen. There were old arthritic people who had to be dragged from place to place and children with cerebral palsy who could go nowhere their mothers couldn't carry them. There were 10-month-old babies the size of 2-month-olds because they didn't have enough to eat, and 10-year-olds with severe asthma who had no medications.

[...]

"It is time that we stop calling ourselves a 'culture of life' when the only lives a lot of people care about are the ones that aren't ever disagreeable, that never make mistakes, that don't place any psychological demands on us. We need to care as much about children who are going to be born, children who have been born, and adults, as about aborted fetuses and vegetative unfortunates."

Check out the entire post here.