In our backyard

Think about what you can buy with $10.

It might seem like a miniscule amount to you. I know that most of the time, it seems that way to me. I get paid $10 for filling this column space once a week. I spent $10 on a book at Barnes & Noble. I spent $10 on a pizza Saturday.

None of this seems particularly outstanding until I put into perspective – 80 percent of people on this earth live on less than $10 a day. Nothing makes me feel quite as frivolous as the idea that my petty spending is equivalent to the daily income of 4/5 of humanity.

The other 20 percent of us? We account for 75 percent of the world’s income. A child dies every three seconds because of poverty, hunger or preventable diseases. This amounts to 26,500 children a day.

Perhaps many of our darling readers are getting poised to write a letter to the editor or leave a snide anonymous online comment. But before you decide to denounce me as a bleeding heart liberal trying to make you feel guilty for what you have over a problem you can do nothing about, stop for a second and realize that you can do something about it.

Consider the fact that less than 1 percent of the money that the world spent annually on weapons could have ensured that every single child on earth would be in school by the year 2000.

Clearly, that did not happen.

That is a statistic for which every person in every nation on this planet should feel horribly ashamed. The underlying message behind this pathetic situation is that the governments of the world are more concerned with blowing each other up (or threatening to blow each other up) than with the welfare of their people.

Don’t fall prey to the assumption that poverty is something that is occurring in some far off land in another hemisphere. In America, there are 13 million children growing up in families living below the federal poverty level, which amounts to $21,200 a year.

In fact, the number of children living in poverty has increased by 15 percent from 2000 to 2007, meaning there were 1.7 million more children living in poverty in 2007 than in 2000.

As bad as these statistics sound, it gets even worse.

Despite the fact that $21,200 is the official federal poverty line, studies have consistently shown that families need twice that amount, $42,400 for a family of four, to actually get by. Anything below that falls under the category of low-income. In 2007, 28 million American children, or 39 percent, fell into the low-income category.

Clearly these dismal numbers demonstrate that poverty is a reality in our own backyards, not the burden of foreign or developing nations.

So when you get a chance, help serve at your local soup kitchen or take a few cans of food to the nearest food pantry. Chances are, it’ll be the best $10 you’ve spent in awhile.