Some Things To Ponder

Rybka

Nit pick; pearl too!
Joined
Jan 6, 2002
Posts
2,449
Subject: Putting things in perspective:

If we could shrink the earth's population to a village of precisely 100 people, with all the existing human ratios remaining the same, it would look something like the following.

There would be:

57 Asians

21 Europeans

14 from the Western Hemisphere, both north and south

8 Africans

52 would be female

48 would be male,

70 would be non-white, 30 would be white

70 would be non-Christian, 30 would be Christian

89 would be heterosexual, 11 would be homosexual

6 people would possess 59% of the entire worlds wealth
and all 6 would be from the United States

80 would live in substandard housing

70 would be unable to read

50 would suffer from malnutrition

1 would be near death

1 would be near birth

1 would have a college education

1 would own a computer

When one considers our world from such a compressed perspective, the need for acceptance, understanding and education becomes glaringly apparent.

The following are also some things to ponder:

If you woke up this morning with more health than illness...you are more blessed than the million who will not survive this week.

If you have never experienced the danger of battle, the loneliness of imprisonment, the agony of torture, or the pangs ofstarvation... you are ahead of 500 million people in the world.

If you can attend a church meeting without fear of harassment, arrest, torture, or death...you are more blessed than three billion people in the world.

If you have food in a refrigerator, clothes on your back, a roof overhead and a place to sleep...you are richer than 75% of this world.

If you have money in the bank, in your wallet, and spare change in a dish someplace ... you are among the top 8% of the world's wealthy.

If your parents are still alive and still married ... you are very rare, even in the United States and Canada.

If you can read this message, you just received a double blessing in that someone was thinking of you, and furthermore, you are more blessed than over two billion people in the world who cannot read at all.
 
I ponder for naught.

OK my saucy sturgeon, I give up.

When I first saw this thread, I thought “Codswallop”.

(For those unused to maritime idiom, codswallop is the stuff that, if fish were horses, one would carefully step around, if one was marching behind one. Is that clear?)

But then it struck me. This is Rybka who is posting. This is the poetry feedback forum. I bet there is a poem lurking in the statistics. So as the title suggested I have pondered for the better part of a day. I have parsed, transcribed and even tried moving every second letter back three paces. Perhaps the numbers were the number of syllables in the line. I looked for limericks; hunted for haiku; sifted for sonnets. All to no avail. No punch line was revealed. No lavalamp emerged.

So, fair flounder, give us a clue. What does it all mean?
 
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