Column: Do not turn a blind eye to others' suffering

Lately I have been struck and honestly bothered by what major media outlets portray as “issues” and discuss on a regular basis. This troubles me because as it turns out, public opinion on what the “issues” are mirror what the media spend time discussing.

With this in mind, I think it is important to remember the media filter reality and do not display reality — meaning that the real issues millions of people face are rarely discussed and therefore are largely not on the minds of people.

I was on the bus near Franklin Street a few days ago, looking out the window, listening to my favorite Pandora station and I saw something I still haven’t been able to wrap my head around. There was a man in a suit waiting to cross the road, and next to him was an older woman with a child sifting through the trash can and collecting a pile of food.

For millions of people, this is reality. We cannot allow ourselves to become desensitized to the realities of the most disenfranchised among us.

How can a society claim to be free when we allow our people to be slaves to labor? When our people do not have the “luxury” of leisure time and recreation? What does this say about our priorities?

It is hard to fathom the level of anxiety, stress and despair involved in being desperately poor in America unless you have experienced it first-hand. Many of these people cannot go out. They cannot attend their kid’s soccer games. They have little autonomy over their time.

The reality is that most of you have no idea what these people go through because they live in the shadows.

When you are desperately poor, your entire existence becomes about money. Many people are plagued by the grim reality that to join the pursuit of happiness, you have to live for the pursuit of money.

Could you imagine living a life that solely revolves around how you are going to survive to tomorrow? How you going to feed your kids? Let’s be real, most of us don’t and can’t even begin to wrap our heads around it. We get comfortable in our worlds and look away from the homeless — look away from the older woman and child digging through the garbage — because it makes us uncomfortable.

We should embrace this discomfort because our brothers and sisters are suffering.

As a privileged group of people, we must not rest until every person is able to live their lives in dignity and security. Because we are all in this together.

Poor people have been pushed aside and marked as irrelevant for far too long. It is time to begin to think about what we don’t usually think about and discuss what makes us uneasy, because there are children around us suffering.

I urge you all to connect with your sense of humanity and understand that things do not have to be this way. We do not have to accept the status quo simply because it is the status quo. We can make a difference. We can give hope back to people who have lost hope.