Reading Journal #5

"Whatever hunger's cause...it can comfortably be addressed with benefit cocnerts and high-profile charity events."

This quote struck a major chord with me because this seems to be a very real circumstance in the United States. We have such an abundance of food and resources that supply nutrients, it verges on disgust. At the same time, the level of hunger in this country also reaches a level of outrage. Being the wealthiest and most "powerful" nation in the world, we should be able to feed all of our citizens, right? This is not the case. The stratification between the upper class and the lower class is such that the rich have too much to eat and the poor are reserved to scraps. Just last night, my Human Behavior class did an experiment, in which we were given a budgt of $265 to feed three people for a month. This utterly shocked me because my mother used to spend $200 a week at the grocery store. I asked myself, "How can anyone live off only $265 a month?" And then I thought, well, how is it possible that my family would need to live off a small amount less than that per week? Are we overeating? Are we indulging in the pleasures of food too much? Is it truly necessary to need that much food? The answer to that question is an unequivocable yes. We had so much food lying around the house, food that was ignored and gathered dust because it wasn't snacks and sugary goodies and things that clog arteries and benefit us in no healthy way. Not to speak bad of my family, but we seem to fall into the trap of overconsumption.

Concerning world hunger, and world health in general, I looked at my family in comaprison to those countries that are starving. We have a veritable world food bank comapred to what some countries are used to. But then I looked at the larger system, the United States itself. For example, one section in the text illsutrates the costs of assisting the victims of the Tsunami in Southeast Asia. Comparitively speaking, the US governemnt contributed very little to this effort, about $950 million. That is but a fraction of what it costs to, say, support the war in Iraq. Citizens of the world, however, especially celebrities, raised billions and billions of dollars. Obviously not all the money came straight out of people's pockets, but it shows that perhaps there is a greater level of caring from people not directly invovled with government. I then looked at a situation that has hit much closer to home: Hurricane Katrina. People are still suffering in terms of health and home living from that natural disaster, and the "releif" that the US governemnt has provided is close to none. Understandably, there are a variety of factors as to why people are still suffering, but I strongly feel that the federal government itself could have done much more to alleviate the misfortunes facing millions of Americans. To further the damage, it is most unfortunate that the Hurricane had to strike in an area where more people are on the low end of the socio-econimic scale than not. In such an area, it is extremely difficult for people to get health insurance, go to the doctor, and repair their ailments. This may be due to "health care suspicions", such as the Tuskeegee experiemnt. African Americans in the New Orleans area may be very wary when looking for health coverage. This mistrust may not lead to anything actaully getting done, but it provides a very different perspective on how sickness is dealt with in this country. It seems that welfare (and I use the term to describe the well-being of citizens) is nto distributed equally, like so many other things in this county.