doug941 wrote:While none of those branches of the family are closely related, I DO have distant cousins who are mixed-race i.e. African Americans.
I reserve personal heartache for those issues I actually can have an effect on.
It is easy to claim inability to make changes if you're not looking too closely at the cause of a given problem.
A thousand people dying from Ebola to the point I can do ANYTHING about are nothing more than statistics. Pray, donate, or ignore it, I CAN DO NOTHING TO ALTER IT. Those things I CAN effect I worry about.
Laws are changeable. Local politics are changeable. More importantly, you yourself are changeable; poverty is not a mystery, and more often than not the result of systemic issues that are the result of decades and centuries of decisions made by people like you. If human decisions got us to this point, human decisions can get us away from it again, it just takes a little bit of awareness. Noone is expecting centuries of entrenched discrimination to disappear overnight, but they certainly won't disappear as long as people decide to be blind to them.
There ONE SINGLE THING that Iosef Stalin is supposed to have said that I can agree with, because frankly it is true. "A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths are a statistic."
And while Stalin was correct in the sense that a million deaths are too abstract to get an emotional handle on, I think that using that statement to diminish an ongoing tragedy is the wrong path to take.