Greed almost captured my voice

The one thing I own is my voice. It is unique to me and reflects my journey. While my voice may share elements you relate to or even disagree with, it doesn’t matter — when we speak our truths, we respect life — our creator. Together they can create a harmony like no other — the sound of understanding, growth and love.

The greed in this world almost captured my voice. I hid to protect it while I tried to repair the damage to my body from storing emotional, spiritual and physical pain deep within, the very aches my voice releases.

Greed has created competition. The competition can be subtle or invades your every waking moment. We teach our children about how to be number #1 but we don’t celebrate the child sitting in the back trying not to be seen.

People of faith bowing to organized worship say they believe in peace, light and justice but in action they slam their door on their neighbors. They gossip about them, judge them, and then make them prove their worth for charity. With all the houses of worship we have in this country, standing proud and tall with their tax free steeples protecting those collection plates- hailing their Lord-why then are our streets filled with homeless? The downtrodden? The hungry? The lost? Why are those doors locked? What are they protecting? Who are they protecting? Greed.

Why should one man’s cancer be treated with more care than another man’s? Are they not both human beings? Does their individual financial status really matter? What if that poor man was Jesus? Mohammed? David?

Greed?

Why are hospitals closing while communities are bleeding? Why are patients lingering while doctors beg the for profit insurance company to please allow them to treat the patient before their eyes? Why is Wall Street earning profits from a corporation like Centene who provides most of the Medicaid managed health care? Greed.

It is the same greed investing in those companies that is also bribing our representatives in our great Capitol. They are there to represent ALL of us, not just those of their political ideology — ALL of us. Truth is first on the list of loyalty is Greed aka PAC funds representing a wealth most of us will never know.

It is a wealth that is destroying our urban centers and rural landscape but yet we’re distracted with slamming doors on neighbors while gossiping about them on social media. Destruction is all around and igniting more flames of Hell and there you sit more worried about a life that has not yet inhaled oxygen in their lungs which are not even fully developed than you are for that child sleeping with their parents outside those locked church doors.

We are destroying mankind. We are destroying our homes. We are destroying our families while grinding away for someone else’s pocketbook, greed.

Do not tell me you love children and want to protect this world when every day you walk out that door without bothering to truly look around you and see the destruction for what it truly is —

But you have no problem judging the victim of rape and uplifting the rapist??

I’ve been raped and I find that appalling. One in four women have been victims of sexual harassment and/or assault — they are the women you love with terms of endearment but you shout slut, bitch and liar at the woman who happens to be a stranger.

It shouldn’t matter who the rapist claims they are, whether they wear a blue or red tie. Much like it shouldn’t matter if you’re the wife of a rapist shouting those insults, if you protect the crime over the victim you are protecting greed — an image. You are not doing mankind and humanity any good.

These are simple concepts but we’re walking around in world with advertisements smacking us around every turn, distracting us — all representing greed.

Why? Why are we doing this to ourselves when the answers are so simple; take care of your neighbor as you would yourself.

Warriors? Patriots?

This is what you want? You want your daughters to marry men like you protect? Why? Because they have large pocketbooks? You’re willing to sacrifice our daughters to the monster of greed?

Greed has given birth to everything that is destroying us including hate, disdain, and ignorance. Slap a Flag on that and call it a day?

If you’re happy with the conditions you’re living in and witnessing, y’all have fun with that — I can’t. I know the pain of being a child and having a man clawing at you — I know what it is like to be hated because you were born — I know what it like to be a wife battered about emotionally and physically and all while my children cried. I know pain.

Even knowing pain I am grateful for my life. I know the love a mother has for a child, a treasure that should be protected with every breath.

I’m not willing to sacrifice my children for greed.

Are you?

We have to do better and it starts with our voices. We can’t stop. We can’t let greed capture our voices. We need to keep throwing those pebbles, creating ripples as they stack into a strong mountain, placing us eye to eye with Goliath, greed.

Then we all win.