Lofty ideas from my poem, "Time Today" constantly run cross current to what it seems I should be doing for day to day survival.. the getting of money for basic needs and beyond.With limited time for higher purpose activity, people are punching clocks and making "to do" lists as the time to help ebbs away.
Our so-called "free time" or time we don't conduct business or work for hire is when we rest and comfort ourselves for sacrificing life goals during money getting hours.
The luckier or better equipped earn enough excess to advance personal and maybe circle of people goals; fewer still enough to better the global community. Blessed are those who combine getting money and helping. For many, what we do for money is separate from life goals. For most, "doing a good job" during working hours involves dividing ourselves into the working being and the self we come back to after work. At various levels of prosperity and balance with life goals in the pursuit of money, focusing on one thing to the exclusion of all else for long hours tends to promote a "tunnel vision" society.
During the Vietnam war, my dad denounced Nixon and Kissinger as murderers while he toiled nightly producing war machine aircraft. It is surreal to me that his working being and his beliefs could be so separate that he'd lost the ability to see the connection between what he labored at daily and the real world. When an entity like Phillip Morris advertises a website telling smokers how bad smoking is while selling death producers, it seems more evil because most large corporations are solely concerned with profit and loss and have so much power to wield. I think it is all part of the same thing, though... people disconnecting hearts and minds from the business of survival and prosperity. Most tobacco farmers wouldn't personally trick 11 year-olds into sucking on cancer sticks [except maybe by poor example], but their efforts are still death producing not life enhancing. Do you think an herbal medicine crafter has more personal peace than a tobacco farmer? Probably more likely to, and I think the tobacco farmer is more likely to deaden thoughts about personal responsibility in the world out of guilt for being on the wrong team.
I think the more we can align personal beliefs with our method of survival and prosperity, the better off we and the world will be. In junior high, I remember receiving literature about communism as the system where "the end justifies the means" but I think our government is equally guilty of this. So are we as individuals living this belief when our efforts run cross current to what we believe. The end, supporting the family, seems to justify working at something that is not life enhancing or even neutral. When the Pentagon destroys a country and kills innocent civilians to control oil and redistribute power through "regime change", haven't evil means been used to reach a so-called good end? Actually, even this end is not good if it is a thin veneer to fatten already fat corporate supporters who make war machine parts, sell oil, etc. But of course even a good end wouldn't justify evil means because others would be hurt.
This tunnel vision society is especially susceptible to the "memory hole" some anti-war speakers refer to as the place Americans throw pieces of imperialist US policy news so that each current bit of rhetoric is accepted at face value. Using patriotism as the vehicle, it seems that politicians can redefine so-called facts almost daily and be believed. Even with most people knowing media corporation motives are impure, I find this blind acceptance also to be surreal.