If you saw a young boy dying in a gutter, would you walk past and ignore him, or would you at least take him to a hospital or get a doctor? You’re probably not the world’s most virtuous or altruistic person but you’re probably not the most antisocial either. So, what would you do, walk past and ignore him or do something to help? Well, most people would help but that’s not because we’re “god’s perfect holy children.” That’s because we’re humans and humans are social animals. We’re animals who survive by sticking together. So, you probably would help the boy. What you wouldn’t do is stand there and theorize about it, demand to know why he’s there, or who’s to blame, or which office of the local authorities to complain to.
But, what if there is a boy dying in front of a gutter and it wasn’t in front of you and you couldn’t see him?
When it happens somewhere out of sight it becomes a different thing, something it is possible to ignore. It’s not your responsibility. Somehow the reality is obscured by layers of rationalizations. It’s not a boy dying in a gutter anymore. It has become something else, something more remote and intangible, something without obvious solutions. It’s become a question of
politics. And politics as we all know is a tricky subject that should be left to
politicians.
Reality is relative, you see. Most of reality is not happening in front of your eyes. It’s not real. Most of reality is, in fact, politics. You probably know that there are young boys and girls dying out there in alleys and gutters and shanty towns of the world’s poor quarters, but it’s one of those
remote realities, and what’s the reason for it? We could talk about
economics, or
geopolitics,
but the truth is: they’re dying because they are out of sight, and they don’t really matter, and nobody really gives a damn. When the parents have got no money the kids don’t count.
In our reality we value children, so much that we’ve made ourselves paranoid about real and the imaginary threats to them, but in global realities they’re not valued. A billion people—that’s 1 in 6 of the world’s population—can’t even get clean water, so their kids get diarrhea, and five million of those kids die every year. Since big numbers don’t really mean much to anyone, imagine a jumbo jet fully loaded with kids up to the age of five crashing into a mountain. That would make the headlines in your local town, wouldn’t it? Now imagine a jumbo jet doing that every 35 minutes, night and day, forever. (That’s one
9/11 every 6.8 hours, 7 days a week 365 days of the year).
And just so it’s clear, African children are not worth less than white children, and African parents don’t grieve less than white parents. They grieve, all right, and they don’t get used to it. Three-hundred (300) kids every 35 minutes—a massacre of the innocent.
Why do famines exist? “Too many kids,” say some people. After all, we Westerners only have small families. But, we only have small families nowadays. In Victorian times we used to have
huge families because a lot of the kids were likely to die, and we needed kids to look after us after we got old because nobody else was going to. So, it seems a bit unfair to blame the Africans for doing now what
we used to do before we got good health care and pensions. If there is no food at all
even one person is too many people, so is famine a population problem?
Well, over 20 years ago the
World Health Organization calculated that the technology existed to feed a world population
12 times its size. Well, we didn’t need to feed a population 12 times its size. We only needed to feed a population one-twelfth (1/12) of that, the one we actually had. So, did we?
No, we didn’t. Twenty years ago we had the terrible
Ethiopia famine instead.
