Poverty is the Fifth Horseman of Apocalypse that the Bible never told us about.
We know the other four: Death, Famine, War and Pestilence. If you do not have enough money to buy Green Gobbler cleaner from Home Depot and your shower starts to have drain flies, that is the Horseman of Pestilence knocking on your door. Your medication runs out and your insurance does not go through prior authorization and you have no cash to pay out of pocket. There we go: the Horseman of Death. The Horseman of Famine is easy to see: without money, you starve. But poverty does not bring war nowadays. The Horseman of War brings poverty. If poverty does not summon war, who does? Money. Money summons war.
Did you ever stand in the Military Expenditures room of the United Nations headquarters and see the minute-to-minute report of weapons expenses around the world? The number keeps growing in uncountable zillions of digits every single second. This is crazy: how ridiculous amounts of money are used to fund war, which leaves human beings poor. The bigger the war chest, the greater the velocity of poverty.
That Fifth Horseman can shapeshift into other forms of misery. Not only being lack of money, but also being lack of love, being lack of time, being lack of pleasure, being lack of memories, being lack of value, being lack of feelings, being lack of all good things we know. Yes, that’s poverty.
In a world where money is God, it is also the Devil.
Last but not least, poverty does not come from being penniless. Poverty is the feeling of never having enough. You can be sitting in depth of poverty in spite of your wealthy digits in your bank account. And you, who has so much, will want still more.
