JetUNsetter

I was walking into a square into one of November’s cold rainy days. It’s Saturday morning and the square is pipping by the crowds gathering to meet, shop, enjoy a coffee or stroll the streets covered in the first dazzling Christmas lights. Lots of smiles around and the classic buzz of a Saturday morning.

There is also a man curled and wrapped in his dirty jacket. Barefoot and shivering, all wet. A little compostable, of course, paper coffee cup in front of him, reluctantly filling up with coins from passers by.

One group of people, think best to buy the man socks from the nearby American brand that promises so much human achievement in its slogans. They hand the man the socks. To their surprise he does not wear them. He seems surprised and happy to get them but quickly pockets them and takes back again his curling position. He leaves his foot bare and continues to shiver. They seem so surprised that, an obvious thought I reckon is that he is not really begging for money out of misery. There is a show put on to maximise the day’s earnings. There is a marketing strategy behind the display of misery. Not much different perhaps to the slogan of the American brand?

I am sure I am not surprising you with my story. It happens every second of the day around the world. True. And I am not trying to condemn capitalists neither beggars. I was just feeling sad that society is allowing so much human capital, human brainpower to go to waste. Each of these humans working to maximise theirs or their employer’s (in all likelihood the beggar is also working for someone) profits could have channeled their potential to something else. If the beggar was given the opportunity to get a warm home, clothing, education he might be the next Einstein. We will never find out. If the slogan writer was given a better opportunity (free form mortgage, free from the need to buy more?) to discover or just cultivate their power with words, they might have evolved into the next Dostoyevsky. We will never find out.

What we all do, is we keep on watching the world working at its own devices. A coin here or there for a beggar. A job or a promotion for the rest. Is that how we will progress? Wasting around potentially our best. Keeping a human, who was some while ago a baby so lucky to be conceived and given all the resources of Earth to survive, into a state or curled up misery. Still, in such awful circumstances the beauty and power of human brain and intelligence came up with strategies. This man was not just sitting there in the end. He had a business plan and his pocket carrying the socks is his inventory. Given a chance he could run Amazon. But we will never know. We seem comfortable wasting what we praise to be the most developed species in the world…

Please help me make sense of this one too.