Catherine Komp recently wrote an article about homeless kids. She says:
Described as America’s “dirty little secret” by social-service providers, an estimated one million young people experience homelessness each year. Many are unaccompanied teenagers, sleeping in parks, abandoned buildings or “couch surfing” at friends’ houses. Others are younger children, often in the care of a single parent, who double-up in relatives’ homes or in crowded shelters. The even-less fortunate live in cars, tents and under freeway overpasses.
Children and families are the fastest growing segments of the homeless population, according to advocates, who say this serious social problem driven by poverty and a scarcity of affordable housing is not widely recognized by the public.
Groups that work with this population say some end up on the streets to escape physical, emotional or sexual abuse. Others might be asked to leave home by an impoverished family to reduce the strain on younger children.
Once on the street, young people of all sexual orientations face challenges beyond finding enough to eat and a place to sleep. NPHY’s director of community relations, Larry Lovelett, said they contend with police, thieves and sexual predators.
How can we continue to let these rates rise?! Unfortunately, the majority of homeless people, especially younger homeless people and homeless families, suffer silently and hidden from public view.
Nonetheless, we know they suffer. We see the staggering rates of homelessness. Let us put an end to his preventable problem.
These young people have as much potential as anyone else. If our society merely gave them the environment to use the potential, rather than leave them stranded in homelessness, these children could grow into productive and healthy members of society.
Reducing homelessness and helping these children achieve their potential benefits all of us.
To solve the problem, we need to enact more than temporary fixes. We can permanently fix the problem by providing education and perhaps job-placement services in addition to food, clothes, and shelter. The homeless person immediately needs food, clothing, and shelter to survive in the short-term. However, food, clothes, and shelter won’t solve the problem alone, because they don’t enable the homeless person to permanently escape homeless and poverty. The homeless person also needs education and/or job-placement services to give the homeless person the ability to support him or herself and permanently escape homeless and poverty.
In my opinion, society can most effectively provide the aforementioned services through private and non-governmental methods, namely with student loans and business loans – assuming we include food, clothing, and shelter with tuition costs.
Julianne Malveaux recently wrote an elegent article connecting national security with hunger. I include an excerpt:
The war in Iraq, President Bush has said, is “of enormous importance to American security.” There’s another kind of security our president might want to focus on – food security at home.
To be sure, he mentioned hunger and poverty in passing during the State of the Union address, but only in the foreign policy context. Yet, 11 percent of all Americans are “food insecure,” which means they are hungry or living on the edge of hunger. That’s 12 million households – 35 million people, including 13 million children – who are too poor to eat balanced meals, or who skipped meals because there was not enough money for food.
Food insecurity in the United States is often recurrent but not chronic. In other words, the food insecure eat most days, but possibly not every day. They sometimes supplement their household food supply with charitable donations from food banks or community food programs. Some, but not all, of those who experience food insecurity are homeless.
Internationally, too, we could do more to fight hunger. Bush raised the issue obliquely in his State of the Union address, mentioning the Millennium Challenge Account and the “strength and generosity” of the American people. He might note that both domestically and internationally the fight to eradicate hunger has a direct bearing on our national security. Hungry people do desperate things, often for small sums of money.
In his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. talked about his “audacity to believe that people everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies.” Even though our nation celebrates King’s birthday, we lack his audacity and his focus on eliminating poverty and food insecurity both in this country and in the world.
Hunger kills far more people than terrorism. Nonetheless, Julianne Malveaux seems to make the point – a point with which I agree – that the continued prevalence of world hunger and poverty causes and facilitates terrorism, because the anger, pain, and desperation of poor people to excuse or, even worse, promote violence and terrorism.
More significantly, I point out now that hunger and terrorism both mainly result from the same problem – the unfair and non-meritocratic inequality of the socioeconomic structures of the world. In other words, terrorism and hunger both exist in our society because our society lacks equal opportunity and thus unfairly deprives hard-working, (potentially) intelligent, and (potentially) strong people the ability to peacefully help themselves. In addition to leading to hunger, that deprivation leads to anger and desperation among the public, which in turn causes people to condone or even support terrorism.
I adamantly want innocent people defended from any form of offensive violence, coercion, or harm. Accordingly, I adamantly want terrorists stopped by any means necessary, including defensive force.
At least in the long-term, we can more effectively stop terrorism by attacking the causes of it, rather than continuously trying to kill and capture individual terrorists.
The worst terrorism and violence comes from governments and organizations. Large groups of angry and desperate people elect, empower and support such governments and organizations. As a result, when we hunt down single terrorists, terrorist organizations or terrorist governments, new terrorists just take the place of the old ones.
We can neither reduce nor eliminate terrorism without the type of diplomacy, activism, and cooperation that reduces the amount of anger and desperation in the public. Let’s work to simultaneously eliminate hunger, poverty, and terrorism.
Jeff Swicord recently wrote an excellent article exploring poverty in the United States. I include an excerpt:
They are a common sight in inner-city America: homeless people, living in the streets and going hungry. To most Americans, this is the face of poverty.
Population experts and those who work at trying to help the poor say the problem extends far beyond those who are homeless, and is often less visible to the general public.
Robert Egger is director of “DC Central Kitchen,” which prepares free meals for the hungry in Washington. He says, “If you ask the average American who is hungry, they are thinking it is a homeless person. And they think that that homeless person is hungry because they are an addict or a drunk. … ‘It is their fault. They are lazy.’ People need to realize that the face of hunger is a single woman, raising two kids, who has a job. At the end of the month, she is going to come up short (of funds) because she is only making $8, $9, $10 [or] $12 an hour. In most American cities, she is not going to make it.”
The U.S. Census Bureau calculates that 37 million Americans are living in poverty – on an income of less than $20,000 a year for a family of four, for example. The number of people living in poverty here has grown by more than five million since 2000, but overall the official measure of poverty has not changed significantly – 12.7 percent of the population (according to the latest figures available, for 2005).
Even the government’s figures say that 1 in 8 United States citizens live in poverty, but these numbers only scratch the surface. How does the government expect four people to live on $5,000 per year each of hard-earned money? Even the average middle-class family, making say 4 or 6 times as much yearly income, cannot afford a house or car, but must buy such necessities on credit.
We fool ourselves if we rely on such meaningless figures as the government’s definition of poverty. Rather, to correctly measure poverty, we need to use qualitative criteria, not quantitative criteria. Qualitatively speaking, poverty affects much more than 1 in 8 United States citizens.
The vast majority of the U.S. needs better education and healthcare systems! The vast majority of U.S. citizens need more time with their kids and families! The vast majority of U.S. citizens get overworked and underpaid!
Without government hand-outs (such as welfare, public education, etc.) the vast majority of United States citizens cannot afford the necessities of survival in contemporary society; At least not without loans in the government-backed credit-based economy.
Poverty does not merely affect those who cross over some arbitrary line drawn by the government. As the elephant in society’s living-room, the complex issue of poverty plagues society and affects all of us.
We can neither rely on the government’s arbitrary figures about poverty, nor can we rely on the government to end poverty. Instead, we need to end poverty ourselves non-governmentally, through personal responsibility and voluntary solidarity. Both individually and collectively, we need to help ourselves, our families, our friends and our communities.
A recent article on Medical News Today reports that stars from the new movie ‘Blood Diamond’ speak out against world hunger. I include an excerpt:
“What is so powerful that it can make you overcome your greatest fear, turn your brother into an enemy, and leave wounds that scar long after the fighting is over? What is so potent, it passes effortlessly from mother to child? from generation to generation?”
The answer: “Hunger — so deadly it kills 25,000 people a day.”
These questions are being asked by actors Djimon Hounsou, and Jennifer Connelly, two stars of the film, Blood Diamond, in a new trailer for the World Food Programme (WFP) that will run ahead of the film in cinemas across the world. Blood Diamond opened in cinemas across Britain and Ireland on Friday, the 26th of January.
WFP, the world’s largest humanitarian agency, hopes that the exposure generated by the Warner Bros. Pictures film will raise much-needed awareness of hunger and poverty, which stalk more than 850 million people globally.
When fighting world hunger and poverty, first and foremost we need to raise awareness about world hunger. Through the trailer at this popular movie, Djimon Hounsou and Jennifer Connelly acheive that exact goal. Additionally, they promote WFP, the world’s largest humanitarian agency. In fact, on average, WFP provides food for 90 million poor people every year.
David Olive wrote an informative article about poverty in Canada. Here’s an excerpt:
If the poor weren’t so conveniently invisible, maybe we’d come to our moral senses and devise a national strategy for eliminating poverty.
But the one in six Canadians trapped in poverty are hidden in plain sight. They return from their minimum-wage work to a cot in a flophouse. They continue to live with an abusive spouse for lack of an alternative[...]
“Poverty is fear, malnutrition, chronic bad health, loneliness, illiteracy and inadequate job skills and no time or money to upgrade them,” Nash says.
“It’s not knowing whether you and your kids will have a decent place to sleep next month.”
Imagine yourself in a state of constant dread. That’s poverty.
John Clarke, an organizer with the Ontario poverty coalition ever since OCAP was founded in 1990, believes, like many anti-poverty activists, that only a widespread sense of outrage will rid us of this social evil.
“When OCAP was launched, I couldn’t imagine that over its history the conditions of drab misery for poor citizens would actually worsen rather than improve,” says Clarke. “I believe Canadians are concerned about homelessness, for instance. But passive indignation is not enough.
“You have to challenge these injustices endured by our fellow citizens. Because only when politicians see that the public is acting on its discontent with the status quo will we see a difference.”
Unfortunately, the United States has higher poverty rates than Canada. Additionally, the privatized insurance-based price-inflated healthcare system in the United States denies the vast majority of poor and homeless people medical treatment.
Nonetheless, poverty is a global problem. Both the United States and Canada float in the same sinking boat. No nation can survive when it values the greedy desires of an undeserving but socio-politically powerful few, rather than valuing the rights and safety of all the people within it.
The entire global community needs to actively work to successfully eradicate poverty through decentralized movements based on the power of the people.
Emergency aid has saved millions of lives, but such help provided over longer periods might destabilise markets, create dependency on imports and delay reforms needed to lift domestic output, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) said in a report.
“Reforms to the international food aid system are necessary but they should be undertaken giving due consideration to the needs of those whose lives are at risk,” FAO said in its report on the state of food and agriculture in 2006.
“Whenever possible, it is always better to teach and help people to fish rather than to give them fish,” FAO Director General Jacques Diouf said.
About 854 million people around the world lack enough food to lead active and healthy lives and more than 90 percent of them are chronically hungry, the FAO said.
Food aid needs to focus on emergencies and target only those who really need it, while longer-term efforts should aim at building the funds, skills and other conditions required to revive local agriculture and trade.
“Although the moral imperative to provide assistance to people suffering from extreme hunger is undeniable … some ask whether such aid may in fact be counterproductive to longer-term sustainable reductions in hunger and poverty,” the agency said.
FAO said it favoured selling food aid where possible on local markets to raise funds for development and urged donors to switch to targeted cash assistance and food vouchers when food was available locally.
I agree so much with the points made in the above article. Throwing food or money at the problem usually makes it worse. Society needs to give poor and hungry people the opportunity to help themselves, both collectively and individually as individuals and communities. Surges of food aid undermines the local markets by under-pricing local farmers and food stores. Instead of treating people like children, we need to work together with them to find mutually beneficial solutions, through such means as student loans, business loans, and employment.
Rather than mourn a good person’s death, it’s better to celebrate the life that they had lived. On today, what would have been the seventy-eighth birthday of the great Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., I cannot bring myself to celebration. I cannot bring myself to happiness.
I am so happy that the great Martin Luther King Jr. graced our world with his messages of hope, justice, freedom, and peace. But, that happiness is overshadowed by my sadness over his premature death by assassination.
Why do the good die young? Why did Martin Luther King Jr. have to die before his time?
I have no answers to these questions.
I have included audio and video clips from some of Dr. Martin Luther King’s speeches and sermons (and a song by Common at the bottom):
The full version of Martin Luther King’s famous “I have a dream” speech:
“This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to open the doors of opportunity to all of God’s children. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood.” -Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King, “Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam”
“A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death[...] Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit. And go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism and militarism.” -Martin Luther King
“We mean business now, and we are determined to gain our rightful place in God’s world. And that’s all this whole thing is about. We aren’t engaged in any negative protest and in any negative arguments with anybody. We are saying that we are determined to be men. We are determined to be people. We are saying that we are God’s children. And that we don’t have to live like we are forced to live[...] We don’t have to argue with anybody. We don’t have to curse and go around acting bad with our words. We don’t need any bricks and bottles, we don’t need any Molotov cocktails, we just need to go around to these stores, and to these massive industries in our country, and say, God sent us by here, to say to you that you’re not treating his children right. And we’ve come by here to ask you to make the first item on your agenda–fair treatment, where God’s children are concerned. Now, if you are not prepared to do that, we do have an agenda that we must follow. And our agenda calls for withdrawing economic support from you.” -Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King Clips:
Common – I Have A Dream:
This is a video for Common’s new song for the upcoming movie Freedom Writers. The clips are from Common, Talib Kweli, Matisyahu, the movie Freedom Writers, and a couple random Youtube clips.
During the Holiday season people give more, but unfortunately the influx of charity and cooperation quickly ends after the holidays. This happened in Utah, where the good people of Utah helped thousands of local people in need during the holidays, but now the state’s food banks still face major food shortages, with many falling hundreds of thousands of pounds behind their goals.
We cannot simply give to charities during the holidays. Rather, we need to work year-round to come up with effective solutions to permanently end hunger and poverty. Essentially, on this issue I agree with The Daily Herald which had the following to say:
The food shortage is a reminder that charity isn’t something we should only practice during the holidays. There is something about the season that seems to make people more generous. Maybe it’s a sense of gratitude for a good year or the thought of someone doing without during cold, dark winter months. Whatever the reason, people’s hearts tend to open.
But, too often, it seems that people put their good intentions and charitable behavior away with the Christmas ornaments, not to be taken out until next November. In their minds, poor people don’t need help during the spring, summer and fall. Worse, some think they don’t deserve it, even little children or the mothers who nurture them.
Poverty doesn’t take time off, nor is it glibly solved. The poor have to cope with finding food, clothing and shelter year-round, not just during the holidays.
While the newspaper articles about desperate families conclude after the holidays, similar stories are being written every day in the lives of human beings in our community. They are still around, still needing a helping hand.
Without your assistance, the food banks may run out of supplies by mid-summer. And hunger in July feels no different than hunger in December.
So, if you haven’t come up with any New Year’s resolutions yet (or at least ones that you actually intend to keep), allow us to suggest one: Make regular donations to the food bank throughout the year. It doesn’t have to be a lot — perhaps just an extra bag of groceries a month.
Ebenezer Scrooge, in Charles Dickens’ classic “A Christmas Carol,” vowed that he would keep the charitable spirit not just during Christmas but throughout the year. We all should do likewise.
The Daily Telegraph of London reported on Tuesday that U.N. peacekeepers and civilian staff were raping and abusing children as young as 12 in southern Sudan.
The newspaper, in a story posted on its Web site, said it had gathered accounts from more than 20 young victims in the town of Juba of U.N. civilian and peacekeeping staff forcing them to have sex.
I find it disgustingly horrific that these UN agents would rape these children, especially when the UN assigned the agents to keep the peace and help the children – and people – in this region plagued by violence, hunger, and poverty.
This just further confirms my suspicion that the UN lacks the ability to successfully eliminate hunger and poverty, and spread education and healthcare, to the world.
