Life can certainly play odd tricks on us all. Some might see themselves as just plain lucky, whereas circumstances can affect the lives of many in our community that consider themselves not so lucky.
Some people are born with a silver spoon in their mouths. Their parents are well off. They never know what it’s like to have money problems and they seem to have the ability, and contacts, to enjoy a very comfortable life
On the other side of the coin, the legends of the ‘little Aussie battlers’ continue to be written. Single parents face enormous personal and financial difficulties. Pensioners often have to eke out their final days in isolation and loneliness, deserted by their family and with their life savings lost by an overnight company bankruptcy.
The out-of-work parents strive to feed their family and worry about unpaid bills. The street kids, abandoned, sleep huddled together for warmth under railway bridges and plan where the money will come from for their next fix.
The old saying is true – ‘We can always find someone worse off than ourselves’. The difficulty is that when we find them, many of us walk across to the other side of the street to avoid the responsibility of becoming involved.
I sometimes wonder what has happened to the adage that says we should love our neighbour? By performing volunteer work with a local charity, we can help those not as well off as ourselves and in this way shoulder some of the responsibility for caring for the less fortunate people in our community.
I’m Peter Mack and that’s life.