Jim Tull

It is not an idle myth, that the poor will always be with us, but a vital myth, a powerful and essential means of sustaining our culture and the business of it as usual. It is a myth that has haunted me throughout my two and a half decades of feeling and actively expressing both compassion and indignation in relation to the persistence of hunger, homelessness and poverty in our affluent nation and abroad.

I recall a Buddhist parable involving a stick that appears from a distance to be a snake, causing fear to rise in the perceiver. As the perception shifts upon closer examination, the fear subsides and the relieved hiker continues down the path. Understanding and awareness have a lot to do with how we feel and how we act. As hosts to the dominant cultural mindset (our collective understanding of who we are in the universe), our minds play a critical part in both perpetuating our dominant way of life and also in shifting away from it.

Genuine communities place members in a circle of support rather than in a pyramid powered by interpersonal competition for external rewards.