Blog Action Day: Poverty of imagination? Lets make peace immortal!

Poverty, scarcity, minority, lack of... there are all kinds of ways to emphasize the not being enough of something. And most of the times, that is considered as a problem; There shouldn’t be poverty of this something. And this something has even more variations. If we look at world issues you can see poverty of food, money, fresh water, resources, love, understanding. All of them are big issues and millions of smart and not so smart people have been thinking about solutions to get rid of this poverty of whatsoever.

Problem is, most of the people who are thinking about solutions do not experience the poverty themselves. They are not the victim, and even worse, they consider the person is impoverished as the victim. I could and would like to say a million things about that, but at least, they are talking about it, while there are even more people who are not thinking about that at all. They have given up, are cynical, resigned and bored to death because "it will never work, go away, make a difference or solve anything."

But if you think about it: deep down inside, don’t we all want peace for everybody? That every child could go to school? That every mother could deliver her baby in an environment with clean and fresh water? That nobody needs to worry whether he will have some food by the end of the day?

Then how come these issues are still there. How come we, being the powerful human beings that we are, want something so badly and so numerously and yet not be successful in that. Now, many of you might say or think, that that is because people still want to save their own butt first. Or people in general are greedy, controlled by fear. And yes, we are still run by our instincts and survival techniques, we want to have as many power as possible. But coming from there, it is impossible to come up with solutions that would make an end to the poverty of somebody else.

In order to solve the poverty of somebody else, we need to look at our own poverty. In the civilized world there hardly is a lack of fresh water, food or education. But instead, there is poverty of imagination. A lack of trust in our own possibilities. A scarcity in daring to believe that we can still be happy with half of our assets. Poverty of thoughts and creativity in how to share our welfare.

Funny thing is that we have had it though. Every human being is born with a healthy dose of imagination. As a child we imagined the whole world being one happy place, while we could not imagine anybody would do any harm to somebody else, let out starting a war. Imagination is the start of creating new ideas, revolutionary solutions, new mindsets and new ways of sharing life, goods and means.

A year ago, I asked my students from the Imaginhero Program to come up with goals that would inspire them, goals that would go way beyond they thought would be possible. One of my students came up to me and said: First I thought of making myself immortal. But that was too easy. I only have to write a bestseller or make a blockbuster movie and people will remember me for centuries. But what would really inspire me, is to make peace immortal! That is something worth getting out of bed for.

I tell you, only if we have this kind of imagination, we will have a chance in getting rid of any other kind of unwanted poverty.

Please check out imaginheroes.blogspot.com for more articles like this.