Elizabeth Schulte writes about people being killed in a world of plenty:
EVERY MINUTE of every day, 13 children die around the world of hunger and malnutrition. That’s the finding of the United Nations World Food Program (WFP). Its latest report shows that 18,000 children die each day–or 750 each hour–of malnutrition and its related diseases.
According to WFP, 850 million people are hungry or malnourished around the world on any given day. That is one in six of the world’s population–or more than the combined population of the U.S., Russia, Japan, Germany, Britain and France. Half of the world’s hungry are children.
In the world’s wealthiest country, the United States, nearly 16 million people are living in deep or severe poverty, according to an analysis of 2005 census figures by the McClatchy Newspapers. That’s more than the total population of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and San Francisco.
What’s so striking about this study is how many people had fallen into even deeper poverty than before. Today, 43 percent of the 37 million poor people in the U.S. have plunged into deep poverty–the highest rate since at least 1975.
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Meanwhile, the U.S. government plans to spend at least $650 billion this year on the military.
If this starve-the-poor-to-feed-Corporate-America policy continues, the future is a grim one for working America.
I find it odd to call the United States wealthy.
Why judge a nation by how we treat its highest citizens? Since the rich usually control the government, doesn’t their well-being most often correlate with the amount of corruption?
I say, judge a nation by how it treats its lowest citizens – the poor, the sick, the wrongfully imprisoned. From this perspective, I do NOT see the socially unequal United States, with its high rising poverty rates, as wealthy.
I am not a religous person, but still I agree with the Christian message that says, “Inasmuch as ye have done it to one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it to me.” (Matthew 24:40)