We throw punches over religion, spit venom over politics, and draw battle lines over the shade of someone’s skin. We shame those who have less, mocking disabilities and poverty like playground bullies who grew older but never grew up. We convince ourselves that the weakest among us are the ones dragging the world down, when in truth they’re the ones carrying the weight of it.
Do we have problems in our system? Of course we do. We’ve built systems with cracks wide enough to swallow entire families, and then we blame the families for falling in.
There’s nothing wrong with someone building success brick by brick, sweat by sweat. Hard work deserves reward. We should applaud the people who grind, who create, who rise. But that’s not who I’m talking about.
I’m talking about the ones who buy power the way other people buy groceries. The ones who own politicians like real-estate, spending fortunes to bend laws until they look like pretzels. The ones who build loopholes big enough to fly their private jets through and then tell the rest of us there’s no money left for schools, hospitals, or living wages.
They pump out record-breaking profits while poisoning the air we breathe, the roads we drive, the water we drink. They pay workers so little that they need government assistance just to buy groceries—only to turn around and scream about “lazy people on welfare” while adding another mansion, another yacht, another lobbyist to their collection.
And while they hoard wealth like dragons guarding piles of gold, they toss us scraps of distraction:
Fight over religion.
Fight over skin color.
Fight over who someone loves.
Fight over left or right.
Argue about everything except the hands pulling the strings.
I sit back and watch this circus, and I wonder: When does the audience finally stop cheering for their own manipulation? When will people see that beneath the labels, beneath the flags and politics and doctrines, we’re made of the same fragile materials?
Strip away the noise, the stories, the illusions, and we’re just cells—little sparks of life trying to figure out how to exist. One species. One race. One chance to get this right.
And if we don’t wake up soon, we may not have another. Because a world so distracted by fighting over the small things never notices it’s losing everything.
Written by Scott Randy Gerber for The Tipping Point Tampa Bay ©2025 All Rights Reserved
