Hungry...for Food, for Truth, for Life

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Google "Haiti hunger riots" as I did this morning and you'll get 165,000 links and counting... we touched on this issue back in January in Let Them Eat Mud Cookies... and then we got distracted again by "larger" world issues...

• the Iraq occupation/fiasco
• the assault on the Constitution, Yoo-hoo, anybody seen my civil liberties lately?
• the political campaign season and the media's best efforts to trivialize it to horserace and gotcha status...which spouse has the corniest jokes, or the most troweled-on cosmetics, or the most money-grubbing ties to Colombia....

When what we should all be doing is paying attention to our world. The media doesn't help. Shiny objects--the latest blonde in distress--get more attention than hunger. It's about ratings and profit centers and who's got the get... and there just is nothing glamorous about a starving nation, now is there? And we don't have to look to Darfur and Africa to find that.

We can look right in our own hemispheric back yard. Where Haitian immigrants fleeing their desperate straits across dangerous waters get turned back while Cubanos are welcomed to South Florida with open arms. Where rightwing ranters fly over on the way to Dominica and its sex tourism trade and juicy cigars.

And the rest of us "fly over" too, turning a deaf ear to the cries for food, for help; a blind eye to the gaunt desperation that drives people to riot, to burn buildings, to attack their neighbors. To foment the seeds of revolution.

We have a Current Occupant who doesn't have a problem with dictators, as long as they're "our" dictators; we have leadership on both sides of the aisle who go along, we have media who hide the truth or slant it for their cronies' convenience and their profit margins.

We are urged to SHOP--Self-absorbed hypnosis on parade.....

Where is our Golden Rule? Our Christian compassion? Our "whatsoever ye do unto the least of my brethren...."? An overarching government policy based on humanitarianism instead of warmongering, unity instead of divisiveness, diplomacy instead of saber-rattling and bombs is good business in the long run.

Starving people without decent jobs do not good consumers make.

This transcends a single program or policy. No matter how much I may care about a single issue, like healthcare, or restoring scientific research, or bringing our troops home, or..... I truly believe we must embrace the "and." Because this year, single issues are more of the same ol' destructive road we've been travelling far too long.

Hunger intersects with economics, and environment, and immigration, and global climate change, and revolutions, and we must look at the big picture we've ignored far too long, no thanks to the slice-n-dice political posturants and the media.