Johannesburg - There is an ugly that lies in our eyes, we are the beholders of envy and we fail to comprehend perspective, we lack compassion and we have a fabricated idea of what agony is.
Forgive us, father, there is a code in our programming that makes it hard for poverty to let go of our minds.
We are not saying those who are monied shouldn't be depressed, we are just saying that we, the poor, can't relate to their pain. There is more room to think in a mansion than in a shack or a backroom.
Our next meal is a magic spell, the rich can afford help, we just lick our wounds and hope for the best.
Forgive us, father, we are programmed as youngsters to think that material riches will heal all of our wounds.
We are not programmed to show sympathy to those who have more material wealth than we do, as if hoarding houses and cars make one impenetrable to depression.
We fail to comprehend how they can be depressed while living in mansions while we are living in squalor.
Sympathy is lack-based and it trickles downwards from those who have to those who don't.
We are victims of a mentality of 'how can there be billionaires while people are starving?; the rich should share their money with us, and sprinkle a little empathy down our way.
But nobody told us that happiness and wellness have nothing to do with where you live or what you have.
For too long we have been learning how to suppress our pain with the motivation of overcoming poverty, we never got to understand that poverty is a mindset, set for failure.
We give so much power to our struggles that we abide by generalizations that insinuate that kids who grow up in rich households are generally weak emotionally, and they break easily.
This we say is mainly because they never had to face "real-life issues", they never had to stand up for themselves to find solutions and some of them end up taking drugs.
This sense is common to us and we don't need scientific proof, we used to think this about white kids until our people started living like them - a thing we want too.
We give so much power to our struggles and we forget that a lot of these "rich kids" are neglected, their parents are more busy working than parenting.
We place money over care, over mental health, and emotional and spiritual health.
The words we speak tell of a reality where the psychological state of a rich and broken child is less significant than that of a poor and equally broken adult.
But in truth, it is simply a war between the rich and the poor, we are bitter and looping in the narrative that we deserve poverty in order to be strong, a false and very problematic narrative we misconstrue from motivational speakers - it is the birthplace of inequality, a dysmorphia of the Black mind when the white minority has the majority of wealth.