Next time you are shopping at the Mall, Costco, or Bed Bath & Beyond and your shopping cart or pallet is overflowing, think of this: nearly half of the world’s population (roughly), some three billion people, are living on less than $2.50 per day – the price of a cheap magazine or a couple of Cokes or perhaps a Happy Meal at Mickey D’s. The opposite of SuperSize – PatheticallyTiny.
When you are next staring into the late night contents of your refrigerator, having paused your movie on DVR, not really hungry, but looking for something to stuff in your face . . . one billion people inhabiting this same world (one thousand million, for the numerically challenged) went to bed hungry last night – not dieting; not low cal; not ‘no fat’ – starving hungry – the kind that really hurts . . . all night.
When you finish that late night movie and take out your DVD, VHS, or power down your computer’s streaming video, consider this. One in four people living on the same planet as you and me, have no access to basic electricity – zip, zero, nada. When the sun goes down, they live by candlelight, if they can afford candles; lamplight, if they can afford whatever burns inside to illuminate . . . as humans have lived for the several million years that we have been evolving into the multi-tasking, digitally plugged in, expensively clothed and accessorized marvels you walk past all day, every day, in your life.
Two in five people sharing your planet and mine have no access to clean water. I don’t even want to tell you what gets dumped, leaked, eliminated; which creatures go crawling, slivering and side-winding, and; Lord only knows what chemistry awaits, in the water that some several billion people drink, wash, bathe, eliminate bodily waste and swim in, daily. My wife took a journalist’s five-star tour of India courtesy of their government with a bunch of well-wined and dined journalists, back in the late 70’s, and she said the Ganges, if you can get past the smell, is a brown, swirling combination dump, toilet, watering hole, place to burn and dump the dead, and the only water source for millions who depend on it. If you or I drank a cupful, without proper anti-bacterial, anti-malarial and the rest of the pharmacological cocktail tourists get injected with before visiting places like India, we would likely keel over on the spot.
In 2009, the world’s 793 billionaires were worth, all together, a combined (and whopping!) $2.4 trillion. In case you were wondering, these 793 lucky folks enjoy something like twice the combined gross domestic product of all the sub-Saharan Africa countries. That means that 793 people who don’t have to worry where their next meal is coming from, or live in the dark when the sun goes down, or drink where people’s everyday lives foul the water, are richer than the combined wealth of some three billion of our fellow humans – nearly half this planet’s population.
The statistics (above) come from a new book by Alan Maass, The Case for Socialism. Now before you throw your computer across the room and stop reading this, know that I emphatically disagree with any thesis that attempts to sell us on the failures of capitalism and the virtues of socialism. I suspect many who read this feel the same way. When I think of socialism in practice, I think of people standing in line in the old USSR, waiting to buy bread from empty shelves. I came into this world without much wealth and, through hard work for most of my life (starting pretty young, but that is another story) have changed that picture, both to my satisfaction and the satisfaction of my family, to whom my efforts have given a richer, better life than the one I had growing up.
But, the distance between ‘Haves’ and ‘Have-Nots’ in this world has become quite insane when 793 people could not possibly spend all the money they have in their remaining lifetimes while, at the same time, three billion people live on what would buy you two songs, and a half of a third, on iTunes. And, just guess which group is reproducing faster!
Three billion people are ripe for the plucking by Madmen – perhaps zealous, misguided hijackers of religious beliefs like the ones who were talked into dying spectacularly along with a lot of innocent people who were simply trying to live their lives, flying commercial airliners into buildings on 9-11. How hard is it to foster hatred, jealousy and furious anger among three billion Have-Nots, against everything we stand for in this country? And, what are we doing to build our public relations – to reach out to the Have-Nots to tell them that, yes, they can work and make money to support their families; yes, they can start businesses and prosper; yes, they can, by virtue of hard work and thrifty savings, build a better life for their children? Is that even a priority in today’s disaster-filled world?
I respectfully submit that we should all take a dose of perspective and realize that the ever-widening gap between the fortunate Haves and the truly unfortunate Have- Nots, on a going forward basis, is absolutely untenable. History teaches us that, when the gap gets really wide, it leads to revolutions and worse, Hitler and Mussolini-styled, fascist madmen, who pick convenient scapegoats to take out their frustrations on and who can hypnotize mass audiences of Have-Nots to do unspeakable things, or to turn their backs while others do. These Have Not people are not going away – in fact, there are more of them every day because they are reproducing fastest of us all; if we continue to ignore them, be assured: they will not continue to ignore us.