Like Ferraris?

Imagine you are tooling around town in your Ferrari. It’s your third car. You mostly take it out for Sunday drives. You are crossing some train tracks and the car dies. A train is coming towards you. You notice a switch that will send the train down another track. But seated on the other track is a house filled with starving African refugees. If you throw the switch the refugees will all, die. What do you do?? I would hope you let the train hit the car. But here is the rub. By choosing to buy the car and not using the money to make the world a better place are you not in effect killing the refugees anyway?





I have sent this story to hundreds of people. The response is almost always the same.





Actually the most common response is nothing. But those who do respond usually say I work hard, etcetera, etcetera, I deserve, etcetera, etcetera.





But if you own 3 Ferraris, or even one for that matter, it is as much about luck as it is about deserving. If your are Shaquille Oneal and you were lucky enough to get the genes you got you are just as lucky as the child born to poverty and oppression is unlucky. There is no harder work NO harder life than imposed poverty and NO ONE deserves that life.





Let’s look at it a different way. How much does that 5th Hummer increase the quality of your life? How much more happy are you with that car than you would be with out it? The difference is marginal at best. You probably would not even notice the difference if it was not in the garage. But you do have a 5 car garage and have to keep it filled. How much does it cost to fix a hair lip on a poor little girl in Bolivia, maybe $ 5,000? So instead of spending $ 50,000 on that car and making your life a tiny bit better, why not make 10 lives infinitely better?





I was having lunch with a friend and before we went to lunch we popped into a jewelry store. She has a friend who makes jewelry and she wanted to show it to me. We were looking and I recognized a belt that my friend wears. I asked how much for the belt. The salesperson said $ 5,000. My friend has a $ 5,000 belt!!!





So while we were having lunch I asked my friend how much different her life would be if she did not have the belt. “Not much” she said. Then I asked. “If your granddaughter had a hair lip and you had to sell the belt to fix it what would you do.” She said, “Well I would just take the money out of the bank.” I pointed out that this was all fantasy/hypothesis and that we have to assume that selling the belt is the only way to repair her grand daughter’s hair lip. Then she said. “Of course I would sell the belt, she’s family.” I said. “We are all family. All of us are one family, one human race. It is about compassion knowing that when you buy something extravagant and wasteful you are stealing bread from a starving child. I know it’s hard because we live in an extravagant country. But you have to know this grand and lavish American way of life is one of the main reasons why the rest of the world hates us. And, why they hijack airplanes and crash them into our sky scrapers.” She said, “Well what am I supposed to do?” I wrote this down on a piece of paper and handed it to her. “Live simply so that others may simply live.”





A couple of days later I was thinking about a singer I saw once. His name was T-Buck. He was talking between songs and he said. “You know we worship all kinds of things, money, Jesus, cars, Buddha, Allah, but more than any of those things we should worship each other.” I recently went to the Philippines. It’s amazing what the internet can do. I googled Philippine surf camp, and a week later I was stepping off of a twin propeller, 12 seat airplane onto tiny island in the middle of nowhere, PI. This island is so remote that they can not get many types of heavy machinery there, so they can not make gravel with machines. Instead they use people. The human gravel makers squat on their heels, with hammers and chisels, and break up rocks. They do it 8 hours a day, 6 days a week, with no safety glasses, no protection on their hands, for 25 cents an hour, $ 2 a day. Even though I was half way around the world, on the very cusp of civilization The Catholic Church was everywhere. One evening began with the sound of church bells ringing, and a bit later I could hear the choir too. Then a few hours later a small stream of people trickled into the neighbors place, maybe 20 in all. They ate dinner and then began to sing and pray. As they were singing I was thinking about T-Buck. It suddenly occurred to me that more than anything the world needs “The Church of Each Other”.





So I say that if you have 100 pairs of shoes, $ 10,000 watches, 5 ferraris, etc., you are worshiping yourself, and you lack a certain type of compassion or maybe you just are just conveniently not paying attention. I am not advocating life in a tent. I am just saying to make conscious choices, and don’t be frivolous, and wasteful. You can still have a nice house, a nice car, etc., but just THINK. That’s all just THINK, and be aware that we all are one. And whatever you take for yourself that is more than you what NEED you are taking from someone else.





I would like to close with a quote from Bill Maher.





Women think about diamonds the way men think about sex, the way leeches think about blood,%26quot; Bill Maher once remarked. %26quot;But diamonds have a lot of blood on them, even without the terrorist connection, because they can not be traced diamonds are used by terrorists, to launder and move money. Diamond mines in Africa are controlled by rebel armies, and the rebel armies control the territory and make the villagers mine the diamonds. The villagers are basically slaves and the Rebels control them through terror, through such lovely things as cutting off the arms of the little children - something you never see in the De Beers commercials. An amputation is forever.





Now, I told this to a woman recently, who was only about the nicest person I%26#039;ve ever met - but she is a woman. And I told her about Africa and the armies and the rebels and the terror and the cutting off the arms of the little children. And she looked up at me with a little sad face and said, Both arms?





Remember Beannie Babies??? Diamonds are pretty much the same thing. I used to be in the jewelry business. Jewelry is what is called a created market. The market is driven by perceived value. What that means is that really good marketers make really good ads and they make us gullible consumers think that diamonds, beanie babies, whatever are rare, valuable, and worth a lot of money. Diamonds are a dime a dozen, it just so happens that most of them come from Africa and not that many people mine them. SO, the diamond miners got together about 100 years ago and decided to limit the supply and they did a really great job of marketing. They used to pay MILLIONS of dollars to make movies with big movie stars just so they could have a scene where the Brad Pitt of the day would ask the Angelina Jollie of the day to marry her and he would give her a diamond ring. So now in today’s times Diamonds are Forever, Every Kiss Begins with Kay, and on and on. They do a GREAT JOB!!!! Those are great ads!!!! Have you noticed that the folks who run the Diamonds are Forever ads are the De Beers family. Those are the folks who mine the diamonds. They don’t care where you buy the diamonds, just as long as you buy them. So anyone reading this ever pay over $ 50 for a beanie baby??? Feel kind of silly? Maybe in a 100 years or so people will look back and say, those silly 20th century people used to pay large amount of money for bags of beans and shiny rocks.





And by the way those diamond miners, the De Beers and their friends are the same folks who brought us one hundred years of Apartheid and complete racial domination in South Africa. 100 years of white folks KICKING BLACK ***!!! I am serious, in the last 20 years literally Millions of people in countries like the Congo have been killed in power struggles over diamonds.





Anyway that’s about it





Looking forward to the responses!!!

Like Ferraris?
what a story
Reply:had 2 much 2 drink on new years eve, didn%26#039;t ya...



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