There’s More than Corona Out There

By FRANK LINGO

I enjoy a plague panic as much as the next guy, but this time I’m focusing on some of the mundane everyday issues of the world.

About nine million people die each year, including three million children, from hunger and related causes, according to MercyCorps.org. That is a preventable pandemic.

The world has an abundance of food. Even with agricultural problems like droughts and floods from climate chaos, there is plenty for everyone to eat.

It’s the tyrants of the world who block access to food for their people.

The United States is schizophrenic on international hunger. We give aid to some countries and sometimes that aid trickles down to those in dire need. And there are private American charities that work hard to provide food to third world countries.

But then we also provide high-tech weapons to dictatorial regimes like Saudi Arabia, which wage wars on poverty-stricken nations like Yemen, resulting in mass disease and starvation.

We Americans have earned bad karma from this. We are complicit in the cruelty. Saudi Arabia has some of the richest men in the world. Their pocket change could feed everyone suffering from hunger. Yet they have zero interest in helping.

These oil oligarchs are America’s allies, doncha know? That’s because the world still runs on oil. Tho the Saudis are implicated in funding terrorism, we kowtow to their every wish and feebly tsk tsk when they commit atrocities.

Some good news is that the number of people in abject poverty has slowly been dwindling. A leader in this effort is GrameenFoundation.org. They pioneered micro loans decades ago, providing start-up funding for tiny businesses with loans as low as $100. Amazingly, this unsecured financing has resulted in people pulling themselves out of poverty and a high repayment rate. Grameen has found that women are far more successful with these loans than men.

By the way, Grameeen currently has a donor matching challenge in effect, which I took advantage of by donating my ginormous column compensation, proving I think, that I’m more than just a blabbermouth.

This underscores an important point. Although billionaires could end starvation and poverty any time they want, most of them give only a tiny percentage of their fortunes. Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffet are happy exceptions to the gargantuan greed that prevails among the world’s super-rich. That leaves it up to regular folks like you and me to donate what we can because otherwise many fine charities will go under-funded.

Another non-Corona crisis continues with climate chaos. I prefer calling it chaos because “climate change” seems nebulous and non-critical. Climate chaos is an ongoing emergency that is throwing the Earth into turmoil, yet it doesn’t get one-tenth the action or attention the virus gets.

The Guardian reports that Antarctica and Greenland are now losing ice six times faster than the rate of the 1990s. The rising and warmer oceans are causing stronger and more frequent hurricanes, which have already devastated many islands, including our own Puerto Rico. And if the US government’s pathetic response to that disaster is any portent of things to come, we’ll have a lot of homeless people in coastal areas in the near future.

The way to reverse our cooking of the planet is to hold our politicians accountable. The Republicans have embraced denial. We must vote them out.

We must also vote with our dollars to change our wasteful ways. Even if gasoline is cheap, we need to go with electric cars. We must insist that our utility companies use renewable energy. At the same time we can make our homes and businesses far more efficient. Wind and solar costs have dropped dramatically and are now competitive with fossil fuels.

Social pressure works wonders. Half a century ago, people smoked everywhere. But because of the disapproval of fellow humans, that deadly disgusting habit has been severely curtailed.

Let’s encourage each other to do the same now to change our treatment of the planet, and our treatment of people in poverty.

Frank Lingo, based in Lawrence, Kansas, is a former columnist for the Kansas City Star and author of the novel “Earth Vote”. Email: lingofrank@gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, April 15, 2020

Populist.com