Few people doubt that we are fortunate people here in Canada, and in North America in general. One aspect of protecting this undeserved good fortune has been that we have wide oceans that lap our shoreline and keep us isolated from the rest of the world. Although events like 9-11 have poked holes in that ocean-insulated security, we still manage to spend most of our lives oblivious to what is going on in the rest of the globe, or at least insulated enough that we can pass off any concerns aroused by disturbing newscasts with the comfort of a “Good thing we don’t live there!” kind of thought.

We don’t seem to realize the full extent of our wealth and good fortune. I suspect that if we did a little survey, many Canadians would indicate a belief that we have about as much wealth as most people in the world, but allow that we have certainly more than that unfortunate group of poor people in the “disadvantaged” countries.

The fact is, we are very well off, even the less fortunate of us, in comparison to most of the world around us. North Americans number only 5% of the world population, and together with another 5% from Europe, this 10% has for decades been in the unique situation of having more than the vast majority of people in the world, while we have used up much of the resources of the world, and polluted more than most in the world (China is rapidly moving into the lead in the area of pollution, largely in its rampant industrialism that caters to our insatiable need for goods).

In Canada, social scientists and government agencies have set a current “poverty line” at about $25,000 a year family income. That’s quite a bit more than the vast majority of the world has at its disposal. An interesting web site called “globalrichlist.com” allows you to compare your family income to the rest of the world. A family income of $25,000 puts you close to being in the richest 10% of the world (10.6 % actually). That’s our poverty line, and almost 90% of the world doesn’t meet it! A family income of $50,000 a year places you with only 1.78% of the world’s financial elite… in other words, 98.22% of the people in world have less income than you do. If we run things up a little further, if you are fortunate enough to have a family income of $100,000 a year, you would be in a group of less than one percent of the people of the world, with more than 99% of the world having less money than you. Your group would measure only 44 million people in a world of 6,600 million+, and you are in there with Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, and Oprah. I hope you feel special.

The world population is almost 6.7 billion at the moment. Nearly three billion of those live on less than $2 a day— that’s about $700 a year! 1.3 billion of those are “getting by” on less than $1 a day, $365 a year. Given that situation, it’s obvious to most people that a lot of them are not “getting by”.

The “not getting by” would be unfortunate if it only meant they can’t get that new DVD player or their kids can’t have an X-Box for Christmas. Not getting by because you have less than one dollar a day (and remember that was a group of 1,300,000,000 people, many of who are trying to exist with far less than even a dollar), means you are often starving, your children are dying, you have no health resources, no clean water, and no hope of anything more in the days to come. UNICEF indicates that more than 10 million children die a year due to preventable causes— malnutrition, and diseases that we could fairly easily handle with our children. If number breakdowns make you take more notice, that breaks down to 27,000 child deaths every day, 1142 every hour, 19 every minute, one child about every 3 seconds, somewhere in the world (but likely not in your world).

Some of us rebel against notions that we could turn this around. In a view that can only be labeled selfish, they feel that attempting to feed and care for all the people of the world would bankrupt us to the point of losing the sometimes questionable benefits of our way of life. Surprisingly, it’s not really the case. The impact is far less than we imagine. We can’t equip everyone in the world with big screen TV’s and laptops, but no one is asking us to do that. What the people of the “developing” (what are they still “developing”? — most of that world has been settled longer than ours) world wants is adequate food, water, shelter, education, and health care.

The basic bottom line is that we in our affluent world don’t care. We don’t. If we really did, we would do something about it. A few weeks ago the Canadian Government was debating what to do with billions of dollars of surplus… pay down the debt? … give taxpayers a break? I didn’t hear any suggestion of keeping a child from starving to death in the barren dust heap of an African village. They aren’t interested, because they know we are not interested.

Selfishness? That for us, and politics for the government. Increasing aid to starving children does not translate into votes or popularity. Government knows— we don’t have the will to do it! Things we are concerned about have a way of getting to the attention of our governments; that’s how the system works. MP’s might get a notion that all the talk at the local Tim’s is about rising car insurance rates, or the high Canadian dollar, but they don’t get any notion that we’re talking about dying children— because we’re not.

Tony Campolo, author, pastor, and speaker, once challenged a well-off church with the comment, “I have three things I’d like to say today. First, while you were sleeping last night, 30,000 kids died of starvation or diseases related to malnutrition. Second, most of you don’t give a shit. What’s worse is that you’re more upset with the fact that I said “shit” than the fact that 30,000 kids died last night.” It was a shocking statement from the pulpit for most Baptist churches, and true to his forecast he received far more indications that the shock came from his language than from the tragic message. He received many complaints, some of them disturbingly vicious, about his use of the word “shit”, but far fewer expressions of real interest in the dying children of the world.

Most of us just don’t care. Those vast oceans serve their purpose. Someone, somewhere, somehow, will take care of those children, despite the fact that no one seems to be doing that, nor planning to —and if you are an average reader, about a hundred children died in the world from preventable causes while you were reading this. But not our children.

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