Dear Bono....

Every day 25,000 people die from hunger, chronic malnutrition and preventable diseases. Hunger and chronic malnutrition are preventable too – they can be avoided by eating a thing called food and drinking a clear liquid type of substance most commonly referred to as water. So by the term ‘unnecessary deaths’ that is so often used to describe extreme poverty, we have to ask ourselves what it really is that makes these casualties unnecessary? The sad truth that follows is that we can then look at extreme poverty deaths in the same way as acts of neglect that are criminal or morally unacceptable in most societies in the developed world. For instance, failing to call an ambulance at the scene of an accident; passing a drowning child at the beach; or being employed with a duty of care and failing to report a victim of abuse. In relation to extreme poverty, every person in the western world is an accessory after the fact. When we choose to do nothing, we choose in one way or another to be liable.

The figure of 25,000 people adds up every day amounting to a colossal body count. You wouldn’t even say 125,000 people dead a week, because famine always works on weekends. You would however be correct in saying that 175,000 die a week or 700,000 people die a month or more than 9,000,000 people die each year. Whichever figure makes more sense is the best way of addressing it. At school, students are taught in Modern History that the Nazis killed 6 million people in Europe over a few years. Today, it takes roughly eight months for 6 million people to die from extreme poverty. And it continues to go on.

However, these deaths are not all war-related. They do not derive from a terminal disease and they are not unfortunate daily occurrences that we just do not know how to fix. Despite funding for research being critical for finding a cure for cancer, unfortunately we are yet to find any such cure. We also do not know how to end hostility between the Israelis and the Palestinians. We do however have a solution for extreme poverty. For an instant, without thinking of the obstacles that might get in the way of administering such a solution, the cure for extreme poverty is called food, it is called clean water; it is called antimalarial bed nets and vaccines.

Without flogging a dead horse, let us try and work out exactly what 25,000 people looks like. If we can identify with something or perhaps some place, it might make it easier to grasp the concept of what it is we are talking about. Omagh, Northern Ireland; Salt, Spain; Mildura, Australia; Dodge City, USA; Kingston NY, USA; Lisieux, France; Warwick, England; Letterkenny, Northern Ireland; Singleton, Australia; Ivrea, Italy; Moulins, France; Blenheim, New Zealand; Alice Springs, Australia; Orangeville, Canada; Oceanside, Canada; Ventimiglia, Italy; Eureka CA, USA; Rota, Spain; Droitwick, England; Russellville, USA; Devonport, Australia; Goulburn, Australia, Nunavut, Canada, Aberdeen SD, USA; DeWitt, USA; Muswellbrook, Australia; Monte Carlo, Monaco; Ardmore OK, USA. All of these 28 towns and cities of the western world have populations of around 25,000 people. Imagine them one by one being sucked off a map of the world each day. There would be a news story every day on each city’s annihilation.

So why doesn’t this figure of 25,000 people make an impression on today’s society? Perhaps it is still not part of our general knowledge hard drive. Every day we are thrown at us figures that confuse us and make us stop short of wanting to know more. When we read or hear of talk about a billion or a trillion dollars, we wonder exactly how much that is? Is a trillion a hundred billion, a thousand billion or a million billion? It makes as much sense as when our grandparents rambled on about a tuppence or a thrippence or whatever type currency they used to use back in those days. Too much or a saturation of information can make out a state of affairs to be more problematic than it really is. This isn’t to say that extreme poverty is not a complicated issue, but our quick acceptance of its complication conveniently enables us to be complacent, inhibiting us from acting in a practical and constructive manner.

Saturation of information happens everyday in the news; however in the domain of politics, it is more than just counterproductive, it is a survival mechanism. A politician’s tactic when cornered, for instance, is to confuse. And you know how embarrassing it is when you can’t follow something – you are more likely to agree and disregard the issue rather than keep asking questions. I adopted this approach during each three-hour installment of Lord of the Rings. But when it comes to politics, we lose interest through confusion multiple times. As soon as someone uses terminology we do not understand, we assume they know more than us. We assume they know what they are talking about. We assume the complicated nature of the subject makes it too difficult to answer so simply.

Additionally, we have seen simple answers to problems fail. We are well aware that simple ideas are shot down via the debilitating cliché of ‘it’s not that simple’. We all saw the footage from 1970 of the dead whale washing up on a Florida beach and the small coastal town not knowing how to dispose of it. Then we saw them blow the thing up with a two dozen sticks of dynamite. Sure, it made sense at the time. This was a prime example of solutions not being that simple. But we also saw the absurdity in Robert Mugabe’s land grabs and the sheer devastation it caused in Zimbabwe at the start of the millennium. We also understand things are more complicated than mass injections of humanitarian aid and debt cancellations. However, we are not the same world we were 20 years ago. Sachs’ economic plan and the outcomes of the G8 Summit and the Millennium Development Goals have provided a framework and certain straightforwardness to the calamity. It is okay for us to be confused; however, we cannot lose sight of the neglect we are participating in by dismissing our confusion so easily. The free world is not honouring the humanitarian aid it has been promising. We should not feel guilty for what is happening but we should all feel somehow responsible.

British comedian Eddie Izzard sees the same confusion in people when they try and wrap their heads around the genocide of millions of people by some of history’s most formidable dictators. Cambodian tyrant Pol Pot is someone currently under house arrest for killing close to two million of his own people. In one of Izzard’s acts he states:

"Pol Pot killed 1.7 million people and we can’t even deal with that. We think that if somebody kills someone then that’s murder and you go to prison. If you kill 10 people you go to Texas, they hit you with a brick because that’s what they do. Kill 20 people and you go to a hospital – they look through a small window at you forever and any more than that we can’t deal with. If somebody’s killed 100,000 people we are almost saying, well done."

Our understanding of the repercussions of famine in the third world is equally the same. With death after death after death after another preventable death, we arrive at the same state of mind we find ourselves in when we ponder who created God. It becomes too confusing for us to continue with so we grab an apple and move on. The difference between mass-murder in a war zone and extreme poverty is that we know how to end extreme poverty ─ we are just not doing it.

If we were a selfish world then I could almost accept that. If we were a planet where survival was a key element to our daily lives and supermarkets were yet to be invented and our knuckles scraped along the ground as we walked lacking all human characteristics of basic human compassion then I could live with that. I would live with that in the same way we tell ourselves not to care about the deer in the wildlife documentary being mauled by the jaguar. It’s nature, we say; or while shaking our heads, oh that crazy animal kingdom. Even though we might never say it out loud, we are grateful to be human beings where our worries have no relationship to something so important as our position on the food chain. We are safe, we believe everyone else is safe too and we are yet to stop taking it for granted.

The unfortunate truth however is that not everybody is safe. Not everybody is considered equal. With Asia and sub-Saharan Africa the way they are where cultures are so different to the western world, we almost attribute one’s poverty to be a part of their background. As if we’d be missing out on something on our holiday to Nepal if we didn’t rough it like the locals. There is nothing traditional about hungry children or children dying from malaria or randomly selected villages depending on UN food rations just to stay alive. And there is nothing cultural about children not reaching their fifth birthday because they have caught cholera or infant diarrhea from consuming bad drinking water. Human rights are human rights. They are not western human rights or civilized human rights or white human rights. They are the standard, garden-variety basic human rights we deserve in congratulations for making it out of our mother’s vagina in one piece. And when neighbouring government bodies are unable to provide those basic human rights then it is up to the ones who can, the ones eating in restaurants, to offer a helping hand.

While we send our overcooked steaks back at the local bar and grill, we choose to be idiots. When we complain about a meal we were looking forward to, we choose to be idiots. Merely looking forward to a meal over conversation and the company of loved ones is a further giveaway that we are idiots. When we are angered by the scratch on the car or the stain on the couch we choose to be the villain in the movie we are meant to be booing and hissing. We should be unlikable just by being a member of society with these values. We are not idiots to want our dream home, a good job and a holiday once every two years. But we are idiots when we lose sight of what is important, take our fortunes for granted and forget the unfortunate predicaments we could be in instead.

And we remain idiots when we constantly justify our behaviour. We are mean at work because we need to exercise our authority in order to gain the respect; in order to achieve the results; in order to be promoted in the company; in order to obtain the pay increase; in order to pay for the extra baby we want to have in our family. The end objective almost gives the meanness credibility. That doesn’t make us idiots. We become idiots when our objectives change and when the goals we possess turn material; and the ability to safely work hard to achieve those goals is taken for granted.

More than just being idiots, the neglect we exercise makes us destructive. Even those who are fortunate to be good at math will find it hard to wrap one’s brains around the magnitude of people dying throughout the world today. And tragically, most people believe that mere acknowledgment that poverty exists and at least being grateful when things don’t go our way, make it okay to move on with our lives. Unfortunately it doesn’t make it okay, it only makes us half way there to making a difference. And half way is unfortunately never good enough.

The problem with people is that we actually believe we live in a healing world. Think of how far we have come in the western world over the past hundred years. The blacks are now just as equal as the whites; women are allowed out in the workforce; homosexuals are no longer outcasts. And once these basic rights have been achieved, it allows us to keep working on the finer issues of human rights amongst women and minority groups. We look deep into the overpopulation of African Americans in prisons or Australian Aboriginal deaths in custody. We explore the reason for the overpopulation of women working in lower paying jobs or evaluate the reality of a working mother in today’s society. We continue to fight for the rights of gays and lesbians to have children or for the sheer entitlement to simply get married. We are idiots not because we want more and more from what we have already achieved but because we continue to allow some people not to have anything at all. And by that I mean nothing. Not a taste of any basic human right other than the right to be thrown into this beautiful yet unjust world.

Without becoming too extreme, allowing extreme poverty to carry on in the year 2009 is equally as bad as slavery. It is as bad as persecuting homosexuals or beating up women. More than one billion people live on less than a dollar a day. Now while some argue the value of which dollar it is we are discussing, the location of where it is to be spent and the important factor of a fluctuating economy – I argue, that those arguers are idiots. It is unreasonable for a person to be living on less than a dollar a day. It is unreasonable for more people to die from hunger in Africa than of war, AIDS, polio, TB and malaria put together. And it is unreasonable for a child to have no interests in life except that of the extracurricular activity of staying alive.

Some people are not even advocates for important issues at all. While some people are dying from chronic diarrhea, others are advocating it. In Australia, some people would rather see their country become a republic than use common sense to prioritise their concerns. In 1999, republicans campaigned vehemently for Australians to vote YES towards the nation becoming a republic while Monarchists lobbied for the NO vote. There was no argument from either team that whatever the outcome would be, there would be little to no change whatsoever in the way the government functioned. Having a president be our Head of State instead of a Governor General or a Queen was to be the only actual change. Even Prince Charles flew 20 hours to Australia from London with a stopover in Bangkok to tell us he didn’t give a shit. We would still be able to compete in the Commonwealth Games, still be able to keep our ties with England and still be able to read stories on the royals in both Woman’s Day and New Idea magazines. But millions of dollars were spent lobbying for this change and millions would have been spent changing it. And in the end, after an exhilarating referendum, Australia voted NO and nothing changed.

But this is not to say people should not have the right to have passions and should not have the right to fight for what they are passionate about. But what we need to agree upon is prioritising our concerns. Australia should be allowed to become a republic if Australians want it to. But we should endeavour for this after we have done everything we can do to feed our starving neighbours. They might not be Australia’s neighbours next-door, but they are neighbours all the same. We are all God’s (or someone’s) children and we are all human beings. Therefore, we need to prioritise people first as worth saving; then the planet, then the koalas, then the panda bears and then the unicorns.

Even some of the press councils (who are in the information business) do understand how grave the economic climate is in sub-Saharan Africa, yet remain somewhat naïve as to how important it is to give these needless deaths news coverage. Executive secretary of the Fijian Media Council Bob Pratt dismisses any need for further exposure on third world famine.

"Extreme poverty receives considerable publicity as it is. It is a very real problem and that is unfortunate."

As a regional journalist I wrote a lot of humble stories on the great work of the local service groups. The Rotary clubs; the Lions clubs; the Lioness clubs; the Red Cross Clubs; the Apex and the Salvation Army clubs. In Australia, two towns a thousand in population each, ten kilometres distance from each other would each have one of these clubs with between 10 and 20 members. If membership numbers falter, a club would rather die than merge. It is the way of the service group. They are fierce, they are bold and they are oh so elderly. Each meeting is like a scene from Cocoon. But most importantly, they have kind hearts and do a lot of good.

From many of the service group meetings I have been forced to attend (and personally, I have not been a member of any particular group since I was 8 and believed I was a T-Bird in my own private world of Grease) I have learnt a shared principle from all these meetings. This mutual belief was that of the project. All service groups had a list of projects they aimed to complete in a period of time. I remember the Muswellbrook Apex group bought a sick little girl a speech machine she needed, to help her communicate. Other clubs’ projects might include holding a barbecue for the local soccer club, an appeal for blankets for the homeless or running a debating competition in a high school.

Chambers of Commerce made lists too of things they needed doing in order to fix up the town or beautify it. They would have plans to fix curb and guttering on streets, plans to build signs for the town or plans to establish racing meets at the local showground. All service groups seem to have lists. But more importantly, all service groups followed a simple rule that in order for anything to get done – those lists needed to be prioritised.

Any Lion or Lioness or Rotarian will tell you that you cannot start too many projects. Agendas are best met when they are brief, planned and executed swiftly. Jamison Park can’t have a new block of toilets, play equipment, turf, barbecue area and signage all in the one day. It would take weeks, or even months just to complete one of these jobs. So they focus on one thing at a time. They raise funds for what they need, execute the endeavour and start planning for what is next on the list. This is not to say we need to ignore global warming before we focus on extreme poverty – climate change plays a large role in drought which plays a major role in having no crops to eat. It is more to suggest that we need to focus on extreme poverty before we focus on mere poverty. Homeless people live in poverty too all throughout the developed world and it is a major problem. However they might be able to meet basic necessities to stay alive, something impossible for someone in the developing world with less than a dollar a day. However, these people need to be fought for too.

The world needs to all agree on what is an emergency at this moment in time, and fix it today. And there are no doubts whatsoever that the conditions in the third-world regions of Asia and sub-Saharan Africa indeed warrant the need for panic. While panic might make an unproductive word, there is no doubt that as time goes on, we are continuing to neglect the world’s most serious humanitarian crisis; and without the media providing us the stories and the pictures on a daily basis, we are unaware of our own destruction.

Why is it that we question everything in our own lives; speeding tickets, haircuts, menus, job entitlements – as trivial as it gets, yet we fail to question the things that matter in this world. Do we really think we aren’t selfish because we are likable at work and good with kids? We continue to think that if we are nice to everyone we know and every new person we meet our consciences should be clear and our hearts kind. It isn’t that people aren’t kind; it is that people aren’t thinking. We have become Stepford wives on the issue of extreme poverty. We have become such zombies to our routines of work, sleep, pooping and annual leave that we are in a constant spiral that sees us merely watching the news just to see what is happening in our own neighbourhoods.

How many times do you see an absolutely tragic event occur in another country broadcasted onto your television screen and the journalist in the studio tells you to sit tight while they figure out how many Australians have been hurt. Or whichever nationality you happen to be. When the tsunami hit, we were counting the number of Australians who died and when Bali was bombed – the amount of Australians injured. The magnitude of Australians killed in Bali made it a direct attack on Australia. Do we only care about people from our own countries? If what we learnt from the media was correct then everybody but our own nation’s people would be worth no more than something we might dig out of our ear hole. However, the gentleman in me begs to differ.

Australian comedian James Smith tells a joke about the traffic reporter on the news who speaks of a fatal accident at peak hour where a semi-trailer is on fire on a Sydney Motorway. The traffic update informs motorists that their best bet at getting home is to take a parallel road that runs west out of the city to avoid congestion because there are a lot of ‘unlucky people’ whose cars are banked up bumper-to-bumper. "Unlucky people," Smith begins saying. "What about the poor guy in the truck?" While I’m sure Smith tells it better, it is a joke that sums up the sheer selfishness we harbour within ourselves and how much perspective we lose from the overall picture. But it also tells us that it is an unwritten rule that society considers the death of one single person as insignificant, when placed next to the hundreds of thousands who are merely inconvenienced.

We even have the nerve to use treadmills, go on diets and watch reality television programs these days. We buy gym memberships and lose weight to feel better about ourselves. Who are we to feel better about ourselves? We are told by experts that we need to love ourselves and keep our self-esteems healthier than anything else but none of us deserve to be happy. Failed relationships, bad jobs and unhealthy bodies continue to depress us. Some people live half their lives in a hospital and have better spirits than the rest of us. Let me tell you, nothing makes you forget your own problems like seeing someone else’s. Because the grass isn’t in fact greener on the other side – situations are dire. But our biggest problems we cannot see. We see them only sporadically in World Vision and Oxfam commercials with the same images over and over again. Some kids look more pathetic than others. However, famine doesn’t go on in 30 second grabs. It is ongoing, constant, real and more than just pathetic, it is heinous.

And we continue to waste food. We waste food in restaurants and we waste food in our own homes. If we don’t like what we are eating then we throw it away and move on to something else. Leftovers are only eaten if money is tight or we are too lazy to cook. But there will come a time though when food can be wasted with a clear conscience. There will come a time when all we need to do is appreciate our planet is in abundance of food, in abundance of a great range of multicultural cuisine and be as fussy as we liked with whatever we wanted to eat and whatever we didn’t. But while we live in a world where hunger kills more than a billion of its inhabitants, then a great deal more respect needs to be shown. This is not to say we should force feed a steak after we’re full – it just means we need to be conscious of what we are wasting and be aware of what other people don’t have. But again, to negate my own point, merely acknowledging this appreciation is not going to fix the problem.

But we are all idiots. Sometimes I am so much of an idiot I can’t even stand to be around my own self. My own company irritates me and listening to my own voice makes me want to take a vacation from me. My beliefs on staying positive and that whatever isn’t killing me isn’t worth getting angry at gets shattered every time I am stuck in traffic or I watch a bad movie with George Clooney in it. I’ll never get those two hours back I say to myself. And for $30 for a small popcorn and a choc top, I’d have more respect if the cinema simply pulled out a gun and robbed me. The whining still comes out of me no matter how grateful I am. Like dogs need to piss on every telegraph pole and cats strive to be the worst pets they can possibly be – the only comfort is that perhaps my idiotic complaining is instinctual.

We are a society of complainers. We complain about things that happen to us and we complain about things that are absolutely none of our business whatsoever. We even complain about what we don’t like in another person’s house or yard. We don’t like the colour of their retaining wall or we find their black roof impractical in the summertime. We even have the nerve to comment on the neighbours’ garden being nice, but also noting that it would not be how we would have done it. The driveway could have been better stenciled, the rendering will age too rapidly and the pastels are all wrong. I mean really, how does any of this matter or have to do with anything substantial?

And how do we not find ourselves unlikable when we hear ourselves say these sorts of things? It is true that it is the great suburban dream to buy a home. And there is nothing wrong with buying a home, doing it up and being continually proud of it. Material items can also be symbols representing one’s hard work and accomplishment. But when it transforms us into, how-you-say, dicks, where all perspective is lost and the understanding that tastes differ from person to person because people are not all the same, this is when materialism takes over and we can be certain that we have reached troubled times.

Even the positive and glowingly optimistic Dave Matthews Band turns into Nirvana when singing about poverty. Just listen to the lyrics in Seek Up and see what Mr Happy says about materialism.

Look at me in my fancy car and my bank account,

Oh how I wish I could take it all, down to my grave, God knows I save and save.

Take a look again, take a look again, at things you have collected

In the end it all piles up so tall to one big nothing, one big nothing at all.

But the cynicism does not end there. Dave goes on to share his frustration with the outcomes of humanitarian aid where it feels like nothing is getting done.

Late at night the TV’s hungry child, his belly swells.

But for the price of a Coke or a smoke I could keep alive those hungry eyes,

Take a look again, take a look again, take a look again,

Every day things change….basically they stay the same.

What does it mean when even the uplifting voices of our role models don’t even know what to do? With all their fame and fortune, even they cannot see an out to this crisis. Is it really so hopeless? If all it is going to take is less than one per cent of the developed world’s gross national product to fix this problem then it needs to be as common knowledge to everyone as the status of Angelina and Brad. And if one per cent of this GNP will take too long then we need to double this figure to the monstrously colossal figure of two per cent. We shouldn’t need to read books to know this, we shouldn’t need to tell other people what we know – it should be common knowledge. It should be on television every night at 6 o’clock and plastered on the front pages of our newspapers; despite the double homicide that took place and despite the new tax laws that are to be introduced. These stories can wait. These stories can come second.

Already I am at risk of being an idiot by simplifying the economic finer points in ending extreme poverty – but before we become saturated by information that will confuse us, we need to first become idiots for a short while and accept that this problem can be fixed. It is important not to take for granted the work already achieved by Amartya Sen, Bill Gates, Ray Chambers, George Soros, Bob Geldof and Jeffrey Sachs. Of course there are dozens of others who have contributed to the cause, but merely finding an answer does not make poverty history. We are at a dangerous point now where the care factor is waning in the developed world. But the important thing to embrace is that we have found the answer. The answer lies in the Millennium Development Goals, the answer lies in the United Nations, it lies in the cooperation between both the rich and poor countries and finally, the answer lies in the press councils.

To stop ourselves from remaining idiots though, we have to stop our own materialism from taking over. We have to go back to the beginning and start getting excited about being human beings and being alive, having air in our lungs and seeing kindness everywhere. We have to get excited about the company we are going to be dining with and not the quality of the food. We have to be grateful for being able to laugh and tell a joke. We have to forget about the renovations we are proud of and the possessions we cherish. We need to appreciate our individual tastes and understand that we are all different. We need to have kind opinions. We need to treat money as a necessary evil; a means to an end and not the required opportunity-maker we all believe it to be. We have to stop wasting food, not because we need to and will one day run short but out of respect for those without these basic human right we now can consider a luxury. And last and certainly not least, we need to stop being mean and start using the greatest gift the human race has either adapted from the apes or been favourably blessed with – a kind heart.