I read a blog post this morning in which this person wonders what he can do about world hunger. Is selling all your possessions and donating all the money to charity the answer? He wonders. If not, is donating just $100 a month really getting to the root of the matter? And he continues to mention the large number of beggars he encountered on the streets of Cincinnati during Opening Day.

This made me think of my own opinions of world poverty, which I will mention here, piecemeal and incomplete, a stream of consciousness, more like.

so...
1) I really am disturbed by ethanol. Here in Ft. Collins, everybody wants to use it, all the "Greenies" think that they are being so socially and environmentally conscious by buying gas with ethanol in it. But the truth of the matter is, it's not at all socially conscious. Perhaps it burns cleaner, but it is made from corn. This corn, largely, comes from Mexico. This corn used to be used to make tortillas for people to eat. Now, farmers can make a better profit selling the corn to fuel makers than selling it to locals or tortilla makers. Corn used for food is running low, and people are starving in Mexico because they're sole source of corn is now being used to run rich people's cars in the United States. In an international food crisis, we're using someone else's food to make gas. Does that seem at all fair? At all socially conscious?

2) I brought this up at Thanksgiving this year, and its still something I think about. Beggars. In the US , we look around at all the beggars and wrinkle our noses and take the long way to avoid them, and then go home at night and wonder aloud what can be done to put a stop to this beggar "problem." Whether "problem" means you hate the way they smell and look or you feel the utmost compassion for their plight and want to help, almost everybody in the US has had this conversation at some point in their lives. We see beggars as something to be fixed. But is it? In many parts of the world, begging is a way of life for many people. In places in the Middle East, beggars are considered to be protected by Allah, and they must be respected, and Muslims are required to give a certain percentage of their income to charity for them. In Cambodia, begging is considered a valid occupation, especially for victims of the Khmer Rouge who may not be able to hold down other jobs in this largely manual-labor-based economy. There, too, beggars are protected by the government as any farmer or tour guide or lawyer would be.
So for many, begging is a way of life. If you can move up in the world, then you do, but begging is not a "problem" until (usually) Western tourists enter into the picture and, bringing with them Western ideas that if you do not live in a $300,000 house with electricity and plumbing and an HDTV, you are poor and should be "helped." We have trouble fathoming that other people may have other happiness that we never know, living our lush lives.
Maybe it's not the begging that's the problem; maybe it's the way we see begging in the US. Maybe, instead of trying to end begging, we try to make sure that beggars are treated with respect and cared for; if they express a desire to move up in the world, that should be respected, also.

3) People believe that by giving up all their worldly possessions, they are somehow saving the world. They believe that by giving up everything, they are experiencing the world like no other Western person has ever experienced. Isn't that a little arrogant? Isn't that a little self-centered, to give up everything that people in India or Zimbabwe or Azerbaijan would love to have, just to feel like you are more spiritual than everybody else? I believe that 99% of the people who do things like that (there are, of course, exceptions), do it for personal gain, to look better in front of peers, to be emotionally and spiritually better than everybody else in the Western world who has electricity and plumbing and HDTVs and cable and fancy clothes and ridiculous shoes. I think that doesn't make you more spiritual, it makes you supercilious and self-absorbed and ignorant of the real world. I'm not saying over-buy completely useless thing, not at all. If you want them and can afford them, get them; if you don't want them, don't. Though I suppose I'm a true cynic, but I've known plenty of people who have helped save the world in their own ways, and most of them have nice TVs and nice houses and they eat hamburgers and drive cars, and they don't try to be better than anybody else by being an ascetic. People throughout the world would love to have modern medicine and plumbing and clean water, so how are you helping anyone by shirking these things?

So, Daron, do I still sound like Dick Cheney? :-)