Son,

Shocked, but not surprised.  That is often the reaction of intelligent people when bad things happen.  A very bad thing is happening on our planet.  Poverty and hunger have become so devastating that the statisticians now refer to a segment of the human population as ‘the bottom billion.’

We are talking about people who live on a dollar a day or less.  About a billion people.  That is a Thousand Million people, a Gig in more technical terms.  The numbers are so staggering that we cannot fully grasp the devastation.  Unable to fathom the sadness, we reduce the human tragedy to statistics.

A dollar a day is not much – but many cultures had managed relative health with their means.  That was before the current world economic disparity.  The American Republican war, coupled with corporate favoritism, has crippled oil distribution, devastated the United States Economy, denigrated diplomatic communications, and has stripped the wealth from the average American.

The folks in power, running the United States Government, are strip farming.  They are taking all of the nutrients out of the economic soil for short term profit.  Exxon favoritism has led to staggering oil prices, fueling world wide inflation.  Protection of predatory lenders has led to phenomenal individual debt.  Personal vendettas engaged a middle east war that has destroyed confidence in oil production and distribution.

The result of these failed selfish policies is a new face of hunger sweeping our globe.

The inflation resulting from corporate greed, protected by the Republican Administration of the United States, have reduced the buying power of the dollar-a-day masses.  People are literally starving to death.

“The U.N. World Food Program is seeing families that previously could afford a diverse, nutritious diet dropping to one staple and cutting their meals from three to two or one a day.”  From the Washington Post, March 12, 2008.

The United Nations World Food Program, and many others have recommendations for change.  They talk about humanitarian needs, safety-net programs, early-warning systems to protect against disasters, weather-related shocks to local agriculture, boosting agricultural production, and improving agricultural distribution networks.

These are noble and necessary ideas.  But the real problem is in the distribution of wealth.  Our government has protected the rights of Corporate greed.  CEO’s of American corporations are paid bonuses that would feed entire third world countries for a year.

Al Quaeda is the tip of the iceberg.  They are the extreme wackos who explode in anger and violence.  But the history of humanity has shown that these outbursts, when met only with violence, are followed by general uprisings of the general populace.  Check out the Boston Tea Party or the French Revolution or the Bolshevik Revolution.

We have now come to a time in the history of humanity where the numbers of the oppressed are measured in billions.  And this is a time when the world’s most powerful economy is purportedly centered on Christianity.

This may be a time for a change in the moral value system of our Government.

Dad