I founded a feed-the-hungry program a few years ago and I’m telling you the way we think about hunger and other socio-economic issues is all wrong.
Hint: It’s not about being “fair” as a feeling, looking childishly for someone or something to blame. We worry more about our “fair share” than real economic justice, more outraged by disparity than poverty.
There’s no excuse for anyone being hungry in a world of plenty, but when we tout out the same thread-bare “solutions” as moving money around and stealing it from some to give to others, we’ve entirely missed the point. We are feeding only our inner brat who wants to see someone “pay” because someone else suffers. We feel somehow our vote for this or that entitlement justifies our sleeping better at night, as if we and our legislators have actually done something. It’s a lie.
Countless laws CAUSE poverty and HINDER charity and self-sufficiency and our sanest response is to keep playing the game, rearranging furniture in a sinking ship. Government is support to PROMOTE the general welfare, not ENFORCE it, and if the latter actually worked we’d be far better off than we are.
How about we take a lesson from shoe-string community organizations who do amazing work instead of bureaucratic budgets that could feed the world but do not? How about we stop looking at hunger and economic “injustice” not as a monetary problem but a social one? We blame “capitalism” yet insist the very worst aspects of it are the solution, so long as the government does it.
I could give you the answers, but I think it’s time the average person does their own homework and EARNS a more mature understanding of the myriad ways to address this issue — ones that don’t center around accounting budgets justified by dubious statistics of vastly diverse people and communities with their own unique underlying needs.
Well, there’s your assignment. Stop griping and picketing and voting and get to work if you really care.