The moral dilemma
Fouad Al-Obaid
An old lady soliciting financial help recently approached me. In essence a beggar! I was left with two options; respond to her plight by giving her a small sum of money, or pretending, as she was not even there, ignoring her! This is not an isolated case, and perhaps many people have come across beggars in Kuwait, and throughout the world. Desperate people that don't seem to be able to find any other mean of subsistence and resort to perhaps the most degrading and humiliating option to live: begging.
Though most people that have been exposed to such situations have developed different ways to dealing with such a problem. The underlying factor that comes to play is our human empathy towards desperation, and the intrinsic realization that perhaps life has dealt them bad card, and that it could very well have been us in their shoes.
Many people I would suspect, if able, would at least acknowledge their presence, and toss out a few coins, or a small bill. Begging is only but a symptom of poverty and desperation. Throughout our street roam many men that you perhaps have learnt to not 'see' though dressed in bright yellow! Street cleaners, maids, drivers, cooks, and an army of invisibles (people that live here but are not living). If one takes time to realize that Kuwait is filled by menial workers that barely make KD 70 if even, some make reportedly as low as KD 30 and are supposed to live off their meager income, and send some back to families counting on their monetary help.
If you start to question your life and juxtapose it with such people's lives, if you visit their dwellings or rather their small bunk-bed accommodation, a feeling of guilt is bound to overcome you! At least it seems to overcome me, and makes me question my life and spending. How do you justify spending money on luxuries when people in your vicinities are suffering unthinkable hardships? How can you enjoy life in essence when you come to realize that many people are suffering? Despite the accepted reality that being exposed to much desperation leads you to accept misery as part of life, and gradually you become desensitized.
You self-justify that you have 'earned' whatever it is that you are now entitled to. However, in the wider scale of things and perhaps in a paradox or human growth and development, once you have fulfilled Mazlo's Hierchy of need and reached the apex, you have more time and the intellectual capability to contemplate on philosophy and the meaning of life.
A question such as the need for suffering, why does illness strike some and leave others in peace, is their justice in this world? Then you think about things that are not age, ethnic, or gender related; for instance, why do people go blind, or why do their bodies stop functioning and render them handicapped? In modern times you have more widespread health issues found in the struggle against cancer in all its forms.
Your normal reaction to all these issues is to count your blessing and at worst it should comfort you that you are doing much better than a wide chunk of the human race if only you are able to read these very words! Do you likewise suffer from such a moral dilemma? If so would you care to share some of the issues that you dealt with and how you tend to react to them?
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