Changing the world one act at a time.

In the aftermath of 49-year-old Esmine Green’s death, after she collapsed in a NY hospital where she had been waiting to be evaluated for 24 hrs, people are scratching their heads.
In a shocking video released to the media, Esmine is seen thrashing on the floor of the waiting room for over thirty minutes, in obvious distress, before she died. Hospital personnel are caught on tape while passing by the collapsed woman, ignoring her condition entirely.
So far, six people including security and medical personnel have been fired and many of the hospital policies have been revised, but six children are still left alone without a mother to care for them.
At least two or three people walked beside Esmine Green while she was in the throes of death, but went on to mind their business as if she was not there.
Since the late eighties, a lot of emergency rooms around the country have admitted that their lack of proper care toward patients is aimed at discouraging people from going to the ER. Because of a drop in health insurance coverage, a lot more people have used ER facilities to treat ailments that are routine care and not life threatening, stretching the already overwhelmed staff, and increasing waiting time for patients who go in for emergencies.
The ward where Esmine Green awaited her death is described as filthy and poorly managed, but that’s not enough to explain the total lack of human compassion exhibited in the waiting room. There is no excuse as to why a human being is treated this way.
With crime constantly on the rise, and violence being glorified by the media, we have become desensitized to the suffering of others.
Especially in poverty-ridden areas, residents are so used to witnessing pain and discomfort that they have made them a part of their everyday reality. Life is given very little value, and incidents such as the one of which Esmine Green was the victim are blamed on one thing or the other, with nobody really stepping up to claim their personal responsibility in the act.
As humans, we love the blame game. We blame everything and everybody, we shake our heads in disbelief, but none of us are truly willing to accept the fact that we are all responsible for what is happening. We can’t change the world in its entirety, but we have the opportunity to change the reality we live in by at least caring for one another.
We spend our lives consuming ourselves with worry over things that are out of our sphere of control, but willingly turn our heads away from events we can personally impact.
We have deliberately isolated ourselves from the collective consciousness of the world, and have become disconnected from the light that each life brings to the whole.
The dim light of one candle might be bright enough to expose the path to walk, but the light of a thousand candles will make the road clear and the obstacles visible.
By opening to one another we can allow ourselves to widen our perspective and understand the value of life beyond first impression.
It is time we reclaim our divine nature and renew our connection to the light that lives inside each of us, regardless of circumstances.
When someone needs our help, whether it is a hungry man asking for change or a woman seeking medical attention, we need to open our eyes and see that we are in front of a window of opportunity, through which we can soar to the higher skies of human compassion and unconditional love. And when the rest of the world seems to be crumbling around us, we can peacefully know that we are taking steps to change what we can, one act at a time.