Blessings Taken For Granted — by John Reed

Blessings Taken For Granted
The rain came, ponds and rivers overflowed. The winds blew, tree limbs and powerlines felled. Maybe a dove returned with an olive branch. In the end, we survived with relatively little damage.
We take so many things for granted. In most places in the world, storms like this cause far more damage and take far longer to recover from. We complain about our road crews yet school buses can cover their routes less than a week after the storm.
For those relatively few people who lost power, electricity was restored within a few hours. Some places would require weeks or months. Basic services like the post office, gas stations, and grocery stores never closed.
Most of us have never experienced true hunger, true displacement, or even true poverty. That has given us a rather skewed view of things and a definite sense of entitlement. It’s very hard to have any empathy for places like Gaza, Bangladesh, or other third and fourth world countries.
Our ignorance of the privations other societies have to deal with leads us to miscalculate badly at times with our foreign policy. Democrats and Republicans alike have misunderstood the African, Asian, and Arab worlds for decades.
We have opened our universities to students from these lands with the idea that they will take American values back home with them when they finish their degrees. I’m not sure that’s actually happened very often.
Let’s try things the other way around: why don’t we send Americans overseas to experience the lifestyle of the countries we are supposedly trying to help? A greater understanding of other true needs would be useful.
And as a bonus… There are some who publicly doubt things are all that good here. Let’s send them first.