Can We Eliminate Starvation in My Lifetime? Hmmm...

    (Things can be bad with us, in the United States and elsewhere, in many different ways. Unemployment, other financial problems, relationship issues, anger, hatred, poor health...) Maybe thinking of worse things help us feel less wrecked by our own problems. Do we suffer from hunger in the United States? Sure, there is that. But not like other places.

    With many memories of the 1970s I remember kids making fun of Cambodians. Ha! They were dying and they were starving. They were so hungry that the chicken was the fastest animal in the country, as the joke went. Kids are cruel. Adults are crueler, at least those who perpetrated the terrible crimes of this Missouri-sized country, the former neighbor. China starved millions upon millions the decades before, if the government was not killing them off as political prisoners.

    In the 1980s Ethiopia became the flashpoint for hunger and starvation. I believe that the world came to the fore, including very famous rock artists from the United States and Great Britain, and to my personal satisfaction my church did a special fast, we being a few million worldwide able to forego a couple meals for the benefit of those suffering in East Africa. 

    Hunger has been a problem since then, in places of catastrophe, in places of war and privation, economic austerity and drought. Swaths across Africa, other parts of Asia, even dipping into the Western Hemisphere, especially troubled Haiti or at times a Central American country or Venezuela, or parts of economically deprived Brazil.

    In the last two years we have seen Gaza Strip, the poor Palestinians crammed and cramped, desperately fighting and dying for wheat or any scrap of food.

    It is too much, 2025. Too much.

    Can we get past this plight in the world, ever, once and for all?

    Please.

    We pray, we work, we sweat, we fight, we bleed, we argue, we cajole, we... too often do not care, because we are fat and happy. We are myopic, and we let our brothers and sisters wither and die.

    I guess that is what we need to eliminate: apathy and ignorance of the human condition.