According to a recent survey by pollster
Social Weather Stations (SWS), the number of Filipino families experiencing
hunger dropped by about one million in late May. From a record-high 23.8
percent last March, hunger rate fell to 18.4 percent as of late May, SWS said
in a report published on its media partner BusinessWorld.
SWS said the new figure translates to
some 3.8 million hungry families, down from a high of 4.8 million families last
March.
Meanwhile, the number of Filipino
families that consider themselves poor has declined, the Social Weather
Stations (SWS) claimed in its new report where it also noted self-rated food
poverty gains.
A May 24-27 survey, the results of
which were made exclusive to BusinessWorld, found 51% of the respondents --
equivalent to an estimated 10.3 million households -- rating themselves as
poor. This was down four points from March’s 55% (11.1 million families), the
highest poverty score so far under the current Aquino administration.
With regard to being poor in terms of
food, meanwhile, 39% of the respondents (estimated 7.9 million families)
claimed to be so, six points down from the prior survey’s 45% (9.1 million).
Government officials said sustained
anti-poverty programs were responsible, adding that this would lead to further
gains.
In America, its war on poverty has so far cost
American taxpayers $15 trillion since 1964. And despite such astonishing funding, America remains coping with a poverty rate that has barely budged, an entrenched bureaucracy, and a
population — like that of Greece and Portugal, two welfare-state basket cases —
increasingly dependent on government handouts.
These are the conclusions of a recent
Cato Institute report on the American welfare state by Michael Tanner, Cato’s
director of health and welfare studies and author of The Poverty of Welfare: Helping Others in Civil Society.
“The vast majority of current programs
are focused on making poverty more comfortable — giving poor people more food,
better shelter, health care, and so forth — rather than giving people the tools
that will help them escape poverty,” Tanner remarks. “The best way to create
wealth,” he explains, “is not through government action, but through the power
of the free market.”
As for the tools to help the poor rise
out of poverty, how about creating programs to change their mindset as proposed
by Dr. Wayne W. Dyer? He is the author
of Real Magic – Creating miracles in
daily life.
In his book, Dr. Dyer basically points
out that everything we need to acquire prosperity has always been within us,
but we must first eliminate the hindrance—the scarcity consciousness—which
prevents us from experiencing abundance in our life. He illustrates this
principle with the following story:
A man who was ragged and appeared to
be without anything in a physical sense came upon a road boss and said, “Can
you help me? I need work.”
The road boss said, “Fine, take that
large boulder over there and roll it up and down the hill. If you need work
that will fulfill your need.”
The man said, “You don’t understand,
what I really need is money.
The boss replied, “Oh, if it is only
money that you need, here is fifty dollars. But you cannot spend it.”
Again, the man was perplexed. “You
don’t understand, what I really need is food and fuel and clothing, not just
money.”
The boss again replied, “If you are
sure that this is really what you need, then spend the money for food, fuel and
clothing, but don’t eat the food, or burn the fuel or wear the clothing.”
The man was finally forced to look at
what he really needed, which was a sense of security, peace and inner
satisfaction. All totally invisible, all within the mind. All divine
sustenance.
The author further claims, “What you
need, you already have, and when you know it, and go within and create it in
your mind, the divine sustenance you seek in the form of material things or
money will be manifested in whatever amounts needed.”
That whenever we say to ourselves, “I
don’t have enough money,” “The economy is bad these days,” “I don’t have the
appropriate educational background,” or, “I didn’t come from the right family
and therefore, will never get the promotion and earn the money I want,” we are
operating in our mental world from a position of lack or the underprivileged.
Therefore, we deprive our own self the opportunity of going into the world of
real magic; hence unable to experience a life of prosperity and abundance.
Dr. Dyer also mentions of the time he
was accused of having a cavalier attitude toward the poor by a radio talk show
host when he was a guest on his program. Dr. Dyer’s contention was that being
broke is a temporary state of affairs that afflicts everyone at some point in
life, but being poor is an attitude, a set of beliefs that gets reinforced when
we shift to blaming life circumstances for the condition of poverty.
One of the incoming calls in response
to this radio conversation was from a physician in Washington, D.C., who had
grown up in a family of thirteen children in appalling poverty in Jamaica. He
disagreed with the host, saying:
I lived in dirt-poor conditions all of
my life. I mean hungry, starving poverty. But I always had a vision of myself
as a doctor. I could not lose that vision, and I would always tell my
grandmother about that picture in my head. She was raising all of us on
practically no income, and she always told me to never, but never, let the
picture become blurred. She told me about the value of that inner picture, and
that I always kept it, and believed in it, I would only have that picture to
act upon.
As I got older and finished high
school, I applied to several schools in premed curricula, and I was rejected
over and over again, but I could not shake that picture that my grandmother
helped me to have as a ragtag little boy playing with the chickens in our
little hut in Jamaica. Finally I was given a conditional opportunity to enroll
in a premed program in Europe, and I worked my way there and through school.
Today I am a physician with a thriving
practice. Without that vision, without that invisible picture in mind, I could
never have escaped the life of poverty that continues today for most of my
brothers and sisters and all of my friends there. They live in poverty and
believe that life dealt them a stacked deck, and that I was lucky. But I know
better. I am living the life I pictured for myself.
And Dr. Dyer, don’t you ever let
anyone dissuade you from telling the truths that you know, because you are
doing much more to help those in horrible circumstances than those who buy the
big lie that their lives are beyond their own control.
Dr. Dyer asks his readers to suspend
any erroneous beliefs that these truths apply exclusively to him, the doctor in
Washington, D.C. and to a chosen few, but has nothing to do with any of us. In
actuality, it has everything to do with all of us.
He argues that these truths transcend
individual lives because it involves universal laws and principles that were
here long before we all showed up in our physical form. He’s simply reporting
on what he knows to be true for his own self and many others. That if you want
to experience prosperity in a miraculous level, he suggests that you must leave
behind your old ways of thinking and develop a new way of imagining what is
possible for you to experience in your life.
The old tried and true adage supports
Dr. Wayne Dyer's principle: Thoughts manifest themselves.
Ask and you shall receive, applies as
well.
By Wayne W. Dyer
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