I've heard many religious people preach on poverty and world hunger and offer their simple and easy way to beat it. It's the billionaires and millionaires! If only those greedy businesspeople would give a tiny part of their wealth to the poor, we'd eradicate poverty and all would be great!
It sounds so simple. Rich people have "too much" and poor people have too little. So the rich just have to give money to the poor and bam, problem solved. I have many issues with this sentiment and I believe it causes more harm than good.
These days everyone seems to want to save the world. They want to end world hunger, end pollution, end fossil fuels, save the whales, end global warming, etc. People seem to think in the grandest and most grandiose of terms. Why go for something small like helping your neighbor with something when you can save the entire planet!
It's a very enticed proposition and one that leads to great damage in my opinion. Let me explain why.
I have heard this phrased in various ways, but how can someone expect to "change the world" when they can't even change the sheets on their bed. It's a legitimate question. Think of yourself. Think of a negative characteristic or issue you've been dealing with. Perhaps you are impatient, maybe you are messy, perhaps you are rude or inconsiderate. Maybe you don't do your fair share of chores. The list could go on. Now, just think of the difficult you had or are having in overcoming this relatively minor flaw. So you can't even overcome something this small and yet you expect at the flick of a finger, you can change over 7 billion people? You must be a real optimist!
By trying to change the world and not ourselves, we are passing the buck on to everyone else while convincing ourselves that we are morally upright and perfect. We adopt a sort of relativist mentality whereby our failures are insignificant and meaningless and we are doing our part to rescue every man, woman, and child on the Earth. Wow, what a sense of moral superiority one can achieve through this!
In fact, many people neglect to do even small things as they are too busy focusing on the big things. Yet, they probably have little if any real impact on the so-called "big things", despite what they tell themselves. People try to convince others to vote a certain way. They spend dozens of hours informing themselves, discussing their opinions to others, etc. In the end, most likely they will get the influence of exactly one vote and have no other impact. Yet they could have spent those countless hours helping out a neighbor, visiting family, or working on becoming holier.
The issue of global poverty is not as simple as saying well look at this huge corporation that had profits of $X Billions of dollars. They simply have to transfer that money and poof, problem over. Again, when we think this way, we shift all the responsibility to everyone else. "I'm not responsible for poor people, that's the responsibility of billionaires." I'm not saying billionaires shouldn't help if they have the means, but I am saying we shouldn't scapegoat our own responsibility on them.
Global poverty is a complex issue. It will not be solved simply by throwing money at it. Bill Gates and Warren Buffett have pledged to give tens of billions of dollars toward eradicating poverty. Will poverty be over once this happens? Of course it won't. I'm not holding them up as moral paragons as there are many issues we could discuss. But I am talking about the concept of money solving all problems.
As Catholics we believe in the value of work. It's better for a man to work and earn money to provide for his family rather than become permanently dependent on someone else to support him. Jesus said to feed the hungry and clothe the naked. But he meant it in a personal one-on-one way, not please advocate for rich people to give stuff to the poor.
The other part is that we don't know how rich we are. If you are reading this from a computer or expensive mobile device, you are relatively rich. In fact, to be among the global one percent, you only have to earn something like $36,000 per year. That's really not that much. What if someone from a poor country was speaking to you and said you should support them because you are among the 1%?
Sure, you could say you may be in the 1% but others are richer. First of all, that's got nothing to do with you. You are given commands by God Almighty. They can't be deflected onto someone else. Secondly, could someone with $10 million say they are not responsible because there are billionaires out there with much more? Could someone with $1 billion say he isn't responsible because Jeff Bezos has almost $200 Billion? Of course that would be absurd.
I also think we as human beings are designed to help those around us first. It has to be a personalized approach. I heard this as one of the key problems with government poverty-reduction strategies - it's completely impersonal. If you know someone who is struggling financially, you can help them but more than financially. Maybe you can help find them a job. Perhaps you can help them with any addiction issue they may have. Perhaps you can provide a place to stay in some circumstances. But you are an accountability partner and you can do much more good than them receiving a paycheck from an anonymous source.
Another point is that poverty is not a simplistic issue. Tens of billions of dollars have been given to poor people and poor countries and yet there is still much poverty. Poverty is going down a lot globally though, but this decrease has very little to do with charity. It has more to do with a global market for products and services and increased efficiency brought by capitalism. Charity definitely has its place, but again I think it mainly has to be personalized.
Stop blaming everyone else for the problems of the world. Help out a relative you've neglected, make amends with an old friend, help out someone who is hard on their luck. Don't think you have to change the whole world and demand others to do your work. Look forward to seeing your comments and have a great day!
