The Least Of These

40,000 children die every day worldwide to starvation and pestilence. India and Africa combined are burdened with ninety percent of this sad figure. The rest are spread over Latin American countries. Fifteen million children die every year worldwide.

Do you cry?

In Afghanistan, children as young as 8 years old are being given away in marriage for the bride price to keep families from starving. According to Starvation.net, someone dies on our planet every other second to AIDs, starvation or waterborne diseases—eighty-five percent are children. 20% of children in Niger, Africa will die before they reach the age of five.

Am I paying attention?

One out of six members of the human race lives on less than a dollar a day while the average American consumer has to dig around in their wallets and purses for a measly $88. Oh, this is our hardship each and every day. The average American family has 16 credit cards that carry a debt load of $8000. Our average yearly income puts us in the ‘richest in the world’ category. Even those at the poverty line in the United States with cars, cable and air conditioning are among the elite class of the world.

Is this easy to swallow?

How hard it is to say that we are the gluttons at the world’s dinner table, hoarding the food on our end and giving only one-hundreth of a single percent ($33 per day per American household) of our bounty and toss it to the starving masses like crumbs. Those kind of crumbs are hard to divide up and spread around. No wonder so many in the world hate us.

Can we blame them?

While we do not even remotely resemble a third world country here on our end of the globe, it’s still awfully risky for children to make it past the age of five in these here United States. Abortion takes care of that with almost 1.5 million murders of our children every year. Fortunately, 4 million others make the cut.

Should we celebrate?

How ironic that we choose to kill our young while scores across this globe wish their children had one more day.