August 8, 2007
by Robert W. Barker

In that early morning hour before the hustle and bustle of western life takes over, when the money has less power and the drive for profits are suspended, we need to reflect.

Here in the West, we are privileged and powerful. Our voices have some weight and meaning; we are the few, yet we wield some limited but dying influence.

Life holds an explicit reward, and offers comforts we often take for granted. In the West, rights and general predictability shine through, and we become sheltered from life's worst problems.  Many in the West are not even aware of alternate global realities.

Our own political powers diminish daily in many ways, and the looming fascist or third world status that follows such leanings looms almost inevitable. Yet, compared to most in the International scheme of things we still hold ample influence, we just hesitate to utilized said powers. 

The starving child in Africa, the Aids victim in Uganda, the raped and tortured of Sudan and wrongfully imprisoned in Gitmo know the difference. Tortured in the name of freedom or wrongfully imprisoned, they understand our privilege far better at times than we do.

The eyes of the child in India facing starvation reflects the pain without the rewards, the blood on the streets of Iraq prove the wrongs with little doubt. People of extreme poverty level, far outnumber the privileged, yet they have no voice, no authority, and are treated as worthless and unworthy.

Tell them the majority rules, and they will look at you with an askance, they know better. Yet we slowly diminish democracy as if it were taken for granted - questionable voting machines, flawed districting or gerrymandering, stopping vote counts by judicial measures and so on - and the power of the individual suffers. These things are our buffers against Third World status. We need to strengthen our democratic policies not weaken them as current trends seem to do.

We complain of taxes and cost of living. They beg for a morsel from our over abundant tables. We ignore them or pay scant attention as we pass them on the streets or sift through pages and pictures of unseemly global strife and sigh. Yet we do very little to stand up to those that would have us in a similar situation. We must recognize the plight and the direction it took to get there, and it was often political maneuvers that kept the peons down.

Avoiding the reality, denying the facts, we move through our privileged world with little consideration as to the plight of billions of these powerless people. Are we to join them in Third World poverty and dispair as the current Administration appears to be pushing America?

Is it apathy, neglect, laziness, gluttony, greed, or just a two-jobs and no time for politics" in this busy population which breeds this attitude of "who has time"?

I say the plight of the third world should be a lesson to all those that think getting involved is not important.

I recall vividly in 1977 the eyes of a pleading mother in India offering us the beautiful female child thru the window of our cab begging us to take the child or she will starve. My wife Mary shed tears, so we asked our Indian friend Subi of the possibilities, of keeping that child.  Subi sighed, and said that it was impossible to adopt a street child without approval from the government and they have a waiting list, so spur of the moment adoptions are virtually impossible.

The child's eyes and mothers pleading haunts our dreams, and reminds me of my privilege and therefore my moral responsibility to my fellow man.

We send some change or a few dollars to charity and hope it goes to the ones that need, help but often it ends up in some executive's account. We weep and pay homage to the children caught in the middle of conflict, yet no one moves to stop the suffering.

854 million people around the globe are hungry, an increase from a year ago by over two million.

Every day almost 16,000 children die from hunger related problems, one child every five seconds. Hunger manifests in many ways. Besides starvation and famine, many deal with chronic undernourishment vitamin deficiencies resulting in stunted growth, weakness, and susceptibility to illness.

Ninety percent of this suffering is derived from a political root, bad policy, wars, and mass migrations for political repression - and random ethnic or political death haunt many areas.

Political red tape ceases food supplies, and even genocide is tolerated for political reasons - like oil - by the West.

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Today's globe contains approximately 6.55 billion people. The USA and the entire developed world including about 57 countries make up about 1 billion of the total human beings on Earth.

That's about one-sixth of the Globe's total population.

Yet 80% of the worlds total resources are consumed by the 1/6 or so-called Developed Nations.

That last statistic is one good reason why we continue to wield tremendous power as a people, not just our government, but each citizen.

We grow fat and apathetic, causing a dire need to look at the world and see one or more possible futures for our own hemisphere.

The so called "Developing world" makes up of 125 low and middle income countries, and 5.1 billion people reside in these middle places.

The remaining 0.4 billion, are Baltic States - Eastern Europe Independent states that are rapidly changing to developed status daily.

They dream of our power as we ignore it and resent being told we do; this life we lead is the dream of billions.

Statistics in 2004 proved that over one billion people live below the international poverty line, of one US dollar a day.

This group of starving people has numerous problems gaining adequate food or water; as a result 820 million people in the developing world are undernourished and dehydrated or both.

Democracy, well preserved and carried out, helps to prevent this destitution. Democratic nations, in general, have very slight poverty in comparison, it seems misanthropic attitudes grow faster in dictatorships or autocracies.

War!

In Iraq, supported by a false claim of Weapons of Mass Destruction and other fear-based info that proved false, this war has many of us asking; why?

No explanation that makes sense, yet we carry on with little protest as the power we wield dies from lack of truth.

In the Sudan's Darfur Region we see genocide and starvation rape and hunger, all allowed or even encouraged, for ethnic or political reasons.

Bellum, in the Congo, is a tragedy too -here over a half a million people have died in the last five years from fighting within the tribes and general revolutions. War breeds hunger, and hunger breeds violence and resentment, all these create a harsher world, which our children inherit.

Last chance soon

While we continue to be among the privileged, while do have some say, this is the time to get involved to spend time or effort to save this republic by voting not at 50% but 90%; lets show up for once on Election Day.

Voting machines should be scrutinized or eliminated, voting laws like the one in Georgia that requires certain Identification with outlets for said ID available in mostly white neighborhoods; have got to cease.

Jim Crow is alive and well in Florida as well, as we saw voter intimidation in several districts in the last two presidential elections.

These are the tactics to which power is grabbed on a grass roots and national level. The sacred privilege of counted, accurate, electoral rights to citizens is what separates us from that plight herein described.

America grew strong because the population grew strong with it, a democracy with some guarantees of liberty and a free market enterprise achieved through entrepreneurs and the powers of union.

Altogether, this proved to be the best system in the world for keeping people out of that deep state of nothingness, called extreme poverty.

Not that we are free of poverty here in the USA, oh contraire, but most here have a way out, and in many places around the globe there are no ways out.

We are the few, yet we do have a voice. It is diminished and dying daily, but we must turn that left-over power handed to us as citizens by the founding fathers into real action. It is never too late, but the hour of indecision and right action missed draws closer. And our once-privileged lives become another great civilizations dreams drained by political maneuvers.

Let us dream again like Martin Luther King suggested. Let us not lose the dream, but strengthen it and spread it across the globe - not thru arms and force - but by example and truth.

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Robert W. Barker [send him email] is a writer, professional photographer and travel aficionado from Eureka Ca. His work is carried on many web sites around the globe, a first novel recently copyrighted in the library of Congress, is soon to be published.