It isn't good or evil.
It's the cavernous and almost endless stretch of pain, injustice, abuse, neglect and power that extends the distance between poverty and wealth.
Poor versus Rich.
Give versus Take.
Life versus Death.
It is no longer a catchy and kitschy theme for a Hollywood television show or comedy a la the rags to riches variety. It's a terrifying and ever worsening two-headed dragon that humanity has single-handedly created. It's a beast that has been fed with the blood, fear and lives of countless human beings. And it is a beast that is killing hundreds of millions of people around the world. Tens of thousands while you read this.
You know the headlines. You've seen the pictures. But it's worse than you think. It's worse than even I can imagine. The "causes" themselves are the new players in the game of wealth versus poverty. We believe that good people and organizations are doing their best to address the needs of those trapped in man-made poverty/war/starvation all over the world, but more than you can begin to imagine, we are led to believe something is happening (with, perhaps, our own money) but in reality, we're being lied to about what is really happening.
In this article in TIME, an employee who works for one international aid organization admits:
"Western aid agencies aren't reaching many of the starving. Some, incredibly, are pretending they are. Oxfam is one agency raising money for Somalia and claiming to be reaching hundreds of thousands when, as a spokesman admitted to TIME, it doesn't actually distribute food and has no staff in the famine area. Less disingenuous agencies will admit the emergency operation is not going well."
It doesn't seem impossible once you begin to consider that the starving child in Somalia is your child. When you look at another human being as yourself, as your loved one, as your own child then everything in your heart changes. What you pay attention to changes. What you advocate for changes. What you can do grows bigger. You grow bigger. And it is in the growing bigger that you do within yourself where the change in the world begins to happen. Your single consciousness can ignite a fire powerful enough to spread across the globe - and change the hearts and minds of people you'll never know as it catches flame between you and your friends - to their friends and their friends' friends.
It's the pebble in the pond. It's one small change in your world that can make a change and bring balance to the dichotomy between extreme wealth and poverty-disease-starvation. It's your heart - and your informed mind - that can and must insist on fairness and equality in the world.
One day, we can and WILL live in a world where hundreds of thousands of human beings don't die of starvation mere miles from stockpiles of food.
You have wisdom well beyond your years. Thank you for writing this to the world.
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