As a Marine veteran meeting another Marine, or seeing a friend from childhood after years of non communication, there is a certain closeness we feel to that person. It can even be someone from my home city of Buffalo, but not always in the same effect.
Just being from Buffalo doesn’t make me feel any closer to you when we are both within Buffalo city limits. However, if you came from my neighborhood, or we were friends at the same school, played on the same tournament baseball team, that will matter more. These are all what I refer to as “circles of commonality”.
It starts to get confusing when context comes into play. Say being in Buffalo and someone telling you they are from Buffalo, it’s like a “no fuckin shit” feeling. But to be in NYC – in the same state, meeting someone from Buffalo makes you a little more interesting.
It’s the same commonality, but in one context it has meaning, and another it is meaningless.
Sometimes, just finding out someone is from the same country as you, makes you best friends – a combat zone, for example.
An experience can also create a circle of commonality as well, like getting bombed together… friends for life.
The further you are away from a given circle, and finding out someone else shares that same circle, that person can get successively interesting.
To my initial point, circles are one of the ways we manage the world around us. Some people have the magnitude for larger circles, and some have smaller ones. That has nothing to do with better or worse. The smaller ones may see finer details within their circles because they don’t have as much to tend to, if you will.
If we all had an Earth-wide circle, taking on the burden of all of those suffering far away can be way too chaotic and overwhelming and can discourage any chance at happiness let alone empowerment. A certain magnitude of wisdom needs to be present in larger circles, or that person will probably end up unstable in some way.
So it has become socially acceptable for those with large circles to ignore and artificially keep their circles small. It’s a bad habit and it’s making people feel like they can’t do anything about it anyway.
I think that’s bull shit.
Worldly issues are hard to deal with and it hurts to think that some of these things are actually happening. Like real life shit not a movie. Hunger, pain, human trafficking, incredible rates of oppression and murder, and too many more to list here.
We wreak havoc on American soil because we think we have serious issues here, and we do, but the vast world of suffering dwarfs what we see and experience here in America.
Again, it’s hard to believe when you do not see it, but that does not mean it isn’t real.
The Santa Claus effect. It takes a bit of faith to believe what you cannot see. In this case, “Santa” is real and represents the kind of pain of suffering that slows time and makes every breath unbearable for those in the thick of it.
For those not, a bad day could be as easy as spilling coffee on their shirt or stepping in dog shit.
After all, everything is relative.
How good does your life have to be before stepping in dog shit is all that is needed to ruin your day.
The Last Peace 
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