Gordon Brown, the UK’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, has some wise words about the war on poverty:
“All of us share in one way a moral sense that poverty disfigures people, that deprivation diminishes people, that human dignity requires that we do something about either the debt or the poverty or the unfair trade that means so many people have not even got a first chance in life.”
Some how, some way, those of us who live in the richest parts of the world need to come to terms with the fact that humanity is only as great as are its weakest members.
It is immoral for one person to live a comfortable life and another to die in desperate poverty due to the accident of their birth.
It is immoral for a child to be forced to go it alone because they were unfortunate enough to have both of their parents die from AIDS.
It is immoral for children to be robbed of their childhood by warfare and gang violence.
In the United States, we are talking a lot about “moral values” issues. But our acceptance of poverty in the world (and even in our own country, which has one of the highest homelessness rates in the world) is one moral value which is being ignored by most Americans.
Shame on us. How dare we claim to be seeking righteousness in our society when we fail to mirror God’s righteous desires that the poor be lifted up and the oppressed be freed? How long will we continue to turn a deaf ear to the cries of our weaker brothers and sisters around the world?
