Shocked by poverty

Watching the BBC world news. They run lead stories on famines in Niger where up to four million people are slowly starving to death. I checked American media sources and it was hard to find the same story, anywhere at all.

So I checked around and here’s the current state of play:

• A billion people can’t read or write
• 2 billion people living (dying) on under $2 a day.
• 20% of the world’s population in the developed nations consume 86% of the world’s goods.
• Increasing gap between richest and poorer countries: 3 to 1 in 1820; 35 to 1 in 1950; 72 to 1 in 1992
• For more depressing statistics: http://www.globalissues.org/TradeRelated/Facts.asp

This can’t last. The USA is balancing off a pole that is rising higher and higher while getting thinner and thinner.

Images of america:
• Receiving aid from overseas and not having any infrastructure to accept it.
• Bush, finally, at the U.N. striking a conciliatory we-will-work-with-you tone.

And this was just after Hurricane Katerina- maybe he’s realizing that at America is OF the world and not somehow above it all.