Youth Rises

Malala Yousafzai, the young Pakistani schoolgirl
activist who was the victim of an assassination
attempt by Taliban

Oriana Lopez Uribe, Mexican youth
activist for sexual and reproductive
health services and information.

I'm encouraged by today's young folks.  Given the chance, they tackle the hard tasks like the teen blogger who took on the Taliban in Pakistan..  And look how they've done as a youth movement in the Arab States.  They jump on board with new technology without missing a step.

"In Mexico, brave HIV-activists are blogging to inspire others with their stories. In many countries, human rights activists are using social media to raise awareness and action. In Macedonia, street artists are using their art to provoke emotions in young people elsewhere. A young rape survivor in the United States used local radio to raise awareness and say – enough is enough, are you with me?"

A 90 Days Christian Youth

Fasting and Prayer for a

new Nigeria

Peace activist Tawakkul Karman has been a key

figure among youth activists in Yemen. She was

a prominent critic of Yemen's President Ali 

Abdullah Saleh even before the mass uprising 

erupted against him in January. Since 2007, she 

has organized small-scale protests to demand 

greater rights for women and freedom of the press.  

The 32-year-old mother of three is the first Arab

woman to win a Nobel prize.

A question for the younger folks...   

You've got connections; some of them on the far side of the world now thanks to social media.  Do you feel connected to your peers across religions, nationalities, traditions and cultures? The question goes beyond how many peers you've befriended on Facebook.

Serious-minded young people. In Nigeria. In church.

Worth knowing: Is their happiness your happiness? Is their hardship yours to deal with, too?   Their struggles with unemployment, hunger, climate change, conflict; are these now on your plate?

Today, we are all part of a big, interconnected family. Actions taken in your country have an impact on other parts of the globe, our common home.

We're connected everywhere. Virtually, we are there and they equally are here. There is no Planet-B.

The Gap

We know a few things about 2020 for certain ...

• more distance between rich and poor
• more access worldwide to the internet
• more unbalanced population growth
• more resource constraints

The gap between the rich and poor of the world

While the wealthy (successful) nations rise, the less fortunate nations stagnate or decline.  Within nations, the wealthy (successful) folks increase their wealth rapidly while the rest stagnate or lose ground.

Ethiopian home life in the center of the nation's capital; I

took this photo from the balcony of a 4-star hotel.

The world is progressively dividing itself between the wealthy few on one side and everyone else on the other.

The $10 dollar a day figure here is well below the poverty threshold in the US
and is provided here to give a more global perspective to these numbers;
the World Bank, however, has felt it is not a meaningful number for the
poorest because they are unfortunately unlikely to reach that level any
time soon.

Governments support the wealthy almost exclusively.  Success supports itself by arranging for more success, wealth with more wealth.  It doesn't trickle down.  It doesn't raise all boats.  The gap widens.

Most people in the world live in poverty.  That's an astonishing statement, particularly because it points to the threshold of survival.  If it's true that most of the world lives there, then those of us who are wealthy don't understand, or if we do, then our minds are calloused, perhaps inordinately selfish, and in denial about legitimate reality.  (We're not real; they are.  We're artificial, supported by fiction, by theft and abuse, by a Tinkertoy structure that the real world doesn't recognize.  OK, that's too bizarre for words.)

Disappointingly, the success of the wealthy is often at the expense of others.  We note that success brings jobs and upward mobility for many.  The actual results aren't so encouraging, though. “Nearly one in six Americans are living in poverty, including a record number of women, and the middle class is struggling amid falling incomes, rising prices, and persistently high unemployment.”
 ~ Andrea Saul  

It varies from city to city and region.

As an example, Washington, D.C. has a dramatic spread across the quintiles with the top income households raking in fifty+ times more than the bottom quintile.  Income for the top 20% is more than the combined income for all the rest.

Where are the key control points?
Not agriculture.  Not education. Not transportation or small businesses.  Probably not even health care. 

Business began between a fellow with grain and another with cows.  They worked out a deal so both could have food and the means of survival.  Or something like that; it was a mutual benefit arrangement.
 
Farms and factories provide food and goods in exchange for the means to have other food and goods.  Not terribly troublesome although larger corporations tend to undervalue their workforce.  The service industries provide skills and labor for daily life's needs.  Resellers like Walmart handle distribution well, but they push the ethical envelope by encouraging unfair labor practices overseas.  

Then there are the banks ...  The community bank was birthed to serve as an intermediate agency between community members, but her illegitimate children on Wall Street have become manipulative giants with tentacles reaching into governments and the rule of nations. 

Many things that happen on Wall Street and in London’s financial
district are “socially useless,” says Lord Adair Turner,
chairman of Britain’s Financial Services Authority

 Thomas Jefferson said in 1802:
"I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around the banks will deprive the people of all property - until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered."

"The financial industry grew rapidly, as did the sums of money with which its players speculated on the prices of stocks, commodities and government bonds. The products they developed to turn money into even more money became more and more complex. At the same time, the risks they were willing to accept became incalculable.
The sector’s high salaries tend to attract the best and brightest university graduates. The members of this youthful elite don’t devise new products that make people’s lives better, nor do they found new companies that further progress. Instead, these young financial wizards invest a great deal of money and effort to develop sophisticated financial products, the sole purpose of which is to generate more profit for both their employers and, ultimately, for themselves — sometimes at the expense of other market players or even their customers.
Many things that happen on Wall Street and in London’s financial district are 'socially useless,' says Lord Adair Turner, chairman of Britain’s Financial Services Authority (FSA). The values that are created there are often not real or of any use to society, Turner adds."

If 80% of the world lives in poverty, then by analysis, that's the 'norm'.  The wealthy are abnormal, anomalous, and perhaps even cancerous tumors in the world.  Their contribution appears to be progressively less relevant and more destructive as the years pass.  It's been that way for centuries; wealth cultivates its own interests at the expense (on the backs) of others.   

Is our view of the world perhaps upside down?  Are the wealthy in fact the abnormal?  Are they like most of the financial industry?  Socially useless? Just criminals, destructive to all 'normal' folks?  Perhaps so with just a few exceptions like Gates and Gutenberg and the innovators that create great jobs and products.

We'll adjust and adapt of course, but by what path?

Interesting prospects, most of which are volatile, and as usual the poor (normal folks) will carry the bulk of the burden. 

“The gains from economic growth in 2011 were quite unevenly shared as household income fell in the middle and rose at the top,” Robert Greenstein, president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington, said on a conference call with reporters.

Average incomes fell for the bottom 80 percent of earners and rose for the top 20 percent, highlighting the need for “those at the top to share” as the nation looks to reduce its budget deficit, Greenstein said.

An ethical economy would make a place for all who were willing to work and contribute, would it not?

The only way for a small group of people to become obscenely rich is for huge masses of others to be kept quite poor.

Childhood is not the goal ...

As an ancient father pointed out, we're not raising children; we're raising adults.  Just a turn of phrase, but his point, kids learn adult thinking from us.  Personal safety,  ethical balance, morality, nobility, unselfishness and compassion, courage, clarity in analysis.  We teach by word, and much more effectively, by example.

Childhood is not the goal, it's the pathway.

Classroom in Kenya

School under a bridge, India

Our hope is that for each child, their early years will include the lessons needed for decision making, the affirmation needed for a healthy self-image, and the experience needed as a foundation for faith in a loving heavenly Father.

Food, water, shelter, safety, a loving family, school.  The basics are a short list; they're enough as a beginning, I suppose.  Oh, and 'hope'.  We want so much for our children to grow up with a heart full of hope and expectation, possibilities and distant horizons filled with wonder.

American classroom

Do the decisions we make as a nation reflect our hope for the world's children as well as our own?  And for their future?

Our petty infighting over the fiscal cliff is disturbing the marketplaces of the world again.  Just like last year and the year before and the year before that.  Such things have an impact that the wealthy don't see.

Note the timeline.  Misbehavior by wealthy nations has brought
trouble to the marketplace.  The wealthy complain about their
investments; the poor suffer real loss and some starve.

The world price of corn has more than doubled in recent years, triggered by the market collapse we caused.  Children in Kenya survive on maize meal (corn meal), but the price fluctuations mean they can't afford to eat.  A family that spends all their income on food can't afford the increase, so ...  Such disruptions often mean kids drop out of school as the family struggles to eat.  Many never return, and poverty persists for another generation.

Do the decisions we make as a nation reflect our hope for the world's children as well as our own? 

Northeast Mombasa, street vendors and buyers. 
The nice stores are for the wealthy.

Different thinking is due.  Over due.  Way overdue.  Tell Steny Hoyer.  Or your own congressional reps.

The family business, pushed to the market area ...

Just down the road from our work site, children and their
teacher make do with a shaded area for the classroom.  No
chairs, no desks, no fan, no air conditioning ...

Have you noticed?  You have access to more educational material than you'll ever be able to use.  These kids, on the other hand, beg for the chance to study and learn.  Now is the opportunity they have.

We can help.  We can make a difference.

Heart issues

This year for Christmas, a family's children decided they didn't want gifts; they wanted instead to send help to children and their families in Kenya.  Others in the extended family heard and did the same.  I'm stunned.

We have about twenty families with whom we are directly connected in Kenya.  There are about fifty kids in the village on our education project; more than a dozen are orphans.  There are a couple of goals:  

• If the kids stay in school, they eat.  The meal the school provides is all some kids get most days.
• School equips them for employment later on, we hope. 
• Work with families focuses on small projects for income.  Buying and selling, raising vegetables, making clothes.  A little start-up help goes a long way. 

Corn and water in a Kenya school kitchen; pretty much life and death issues, unfortunately.

 It's been a really difficult year.

Poverty is a tough cycle to break.  Progress from generation to generation can be excruciatingly small, and a bad year can take it all back.  

In the most difficult of areas, water and food, shelter and sanitation, education and healthcare (of any kind) are in short supply.  Simple skills like avoiding contaminated water require community action and support. 

Thank you Father for the chance to know and help.  Thanks for the generosity of children that makes today's efforts possible.

Starry, starry night ...

Vincent van Gogh sold just one painting during his career.  The best of his works were done in a brief three-year period before he took his own life, "... for the good of all." 

Attempts were made to bring him back from the edge where his mental dysfunction had dragged him, but with little effect.  There was no science or medical understanding in those days for the brokenness of his mind, the chemical imbalances, the upside-down causes and effects.  The world had no place for him.  Things are perhaps a little better now.

It does make you wonder, though.  Our human world seems well-equipped for some but perhaps not for all.  At its center, the successful among us find society welcoming us and making a place for us.  Moving outward from that center though, life becomes progressively more difficult.  Less opportunity, less welcome, less of a comfortable place and more of a struggle just to survive.

At its center, success shapes more success for itself, and it does so at the expense of the larger whole. 

World trade practices favor the powerful and wealthy, while often negatively affecting people struggling to make a living.  World governance shapes itself to foster business and power, often at the expense of justice for the marginalized.

In a small African country, dad and his kids tend their prolific garden plot.  Okra (!), corn, beans, manioc; enough to
feed themselves and sell a little.  A family of six, they're working hard and making progress.  We get to be part of it
with them.  (A friend from the states provided the start-up help.)

Perhaps the next world will be better.  Or rather than resignation, might we instead reshape this one?  One little piece at a time!  What could be more fun than that?

Merry Christmas, 2012.

Don't want to be numb

numb dumb blind.

Meeting my brothers and sisters, and their kids ... probably the most fun you can have this side of the next world.

A bit of a dilemma followed.

Coming back yet again from Africa, I find it hard to face my own home.  All I can think of is moving to a simpler place, a cabin perhaps, or a garage.  I'm uncomfortable with my lifestyle.  The years spent in pursuit of education, career, retirement ... all oddly out of balance viewed from recent experience.

Sackcloth seems more appropriate, somehow. 

It hadn't occurred to me in my youth that much thought was needed in regards to others.  Things would work out, I supposed.  

Things will work out?  They don't, actually.  Kids go hungry, adults work harder for less.  Poverty in my country is considered wealthy in most of the world.  

For many, $65 a month is a typical wage if they have a job.
 
An average U.S. home, converted to materials and money, would provide housing for between fifty and perhaps a few hundred families in some other places.  The economic differences between countries are a problem; the people, well we're all pretty much the same.
 

Neighborhood kids, out of school for the afternoon.  'Don't call me 'Babe' on my goddaughter's shirt.

I have no idea where that one came from.  :)

Growing up, I believed the common version of class distinctions; that wealth was somehow an indication of having worked harder or being smarter or better. 

Then I saw that those without wealth work harder than anyone I know, that they rise up and try again and again, and that they genuinely understand community.  They know more about survival and what's really important.  And they're nicer than me, most of them.  I didn't know.

Cooking requires firewood for the stove.

It's taking awhile to re-balance my own worldview.

Old questions have different answers now.

• The world's finest gentlemen may well be ...
• The most noble among us are perhaps these ...
• The most hospitable of families are ...
• The truly courageous today are those ...
• Strength, grace, joy, hope, and faith are most visible in ...  
• Members of my hero short-list are ... 

Bishop Samuel in Kenya and kids he helps to stay in school ...
I got to meet one of these kids when I was there.

The family that adopted us ...
UPDATE: 2016 - the kids are
grown up and on Facebook!
We text msg sometimes and
video chat.

Balance!  I'm still reeling a bit.  My wife, too.  :)  What fun!  OK, not so much fun, maybe, but what fascinating changes.  

Wife and dear friend in western Africa

Now there are no longer insiders and outsiders, gentile and gaijin, us and them, but just the one family, and one God and Father of us all.

 

Hmmm.  Where do you go with that kind of thinking?