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Wednesday, April 18, 2007

***UPDATE*** Social Poverty

********************UPDATE*********************
Just as I suspected.
Click here for related story.
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There is a certain violence done to a person when loneliness isolates that person from real connection. That violence, once internalized, may explode.

Being marginalized, excluded, alienated, and sent to the edges is maddening. It makes body, mind, and spirit deteriorate into something less than human.

We have one task in life. Be human. And we cannot do it alone. Humans are not human in isolation. Isolation caused by social poverty drains the soul of its humanity, leaving flesh that functions, but does not live.

We must make friends. We must be friends. We must not settle for personal social wealth while others live - exist - in social poverty. We must invest time and meaning into people. We must allow some friendships to be costly in emotion and expensive in time. We must not merely be friends with people who can do something for us, we must also be friends with people who have nothing for us. In fact, if the only friends we have are people can do something for us, then there is a certain moral poverty that joins us in our social wealth.

We must befriend the unfriendable.

Cho Seung-Hui, of the Virginia Tech massacre, lived in abject social poverty. Had he some friends, he might still have had a mental disorder, but he might not have killed.

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