By G. E. Shuman
I pop popcorn... for squirrels...
sometimes. I also save bread pieces, crumbled cookies, and other
'delicacies' to give them. You see, I have a squirrel feeder attached
to a tree behind our house, and I just happen to like feeding the
squirrels. Most people feed birds, and get annoyed when squirrels
invade their bird feeders, but I have eliminated that frustrating
problem by just feeding the squirrels. Birds are okay, but squirrels
are cuter, in my estimation, and, hey, don't they have to eat, too?
I made the feeder, for free, out of a plastic shoe box I found in our
cellar, and, ingeniously, or maybe ingeniously if you're a sixth
grader, figured out a way to use the shoe box top as a sort of roof
or shelter for the squirrels as they stop to feast on whatever form
of carbohydrate I have recently found to fill the feeder. I just used
my power screw driver to secure the feeder to the tree, although I
will now probably be arrested for torturing the tree. I don't care.
My three word question, “Why don't
we?” that I wrote as the title of this column, is incomplete
without three more words, which are these: “feed the people?”
I'm serious about this question, although I know that there have been
heroic efforts throughout the history of our great country, to do
just that, to feed the people. America is the most giving nation on
the earth, with efforts to solve many huge humanitarian problems
here, and around the globe. Still, we still don't feed all of the
hungry people, do we? My question stands: Why don't we? I'm
serious. Why don't we?
If you notice, my question is not “Why
can't we?” I just don't believe that the notion that we can't feed
the people is true at all. I do remember, years ago, seeing an
editorial cartoon in the paper, showing the earth just jammed with
people, with arms and legs sticking out everywhere, with many of
those pen and ink people actually falling off the planet, as young
birds fall out of their nest, simply for lack of room. But, (reality
check here,) that was just a crudely-drawn editorial cartoon...
although it is surprising how long that intentionally-misleading
image has remained in my mind. In reality, (I love reality when it
supports my view.) the image presented and the idea promoted by that
cartoon are not reality, at all. (Besides, you can't fall off a
planet.)
You see, the fact is that earth is a
lot bigger than we seem to think. In our age of instant
communication with nearly every spot on the globe, we seem to have
swallowed the old notion of it being 'a small world.' Truthfully, it
is anything but. If you don't believe me, try walking the
globally-miniscule distance from your Vermont home to the coast of
Maine, or even to the New Hampshire boarder. Did you know that, and
I'm not suggesting that we try physically proving this, every person
alive today could fit in the state of Texas, with each individual
man, woman, child and infant having 1,000 square feet of living
space? It's true. If you don't believe me have your ten year old
take out his i phone, research and compute the number of square feet
in Texas, and divide that number by six billion, which is the
approximate number of people on earth. It seems like we could find
room in our other 49 states, not to mention the other 195 countries
in the world, to grow enough food to feed us. My point is that there
is plenty of room here, plenty of clean water for everybody, and
plenty of fresh oxygen for a population much larger than what the
world holds today.
Speaking of your ten year old's i
phone, do you remember hearing, over the years, the following cliched
statement?: “If we can put a man on the moon... (then whatever the
person's 'why can't' question is filled in here.)” Well, the truth
is, I think we can do most things if we can put a man on the moon,
which we did, over 42 years ago. In fact, we put 12 American
astronauts on the moon, and a total of 27 Americans have orbited the
moon and returned safely to earth. Every single aspect of technology
has advanced a thousand-fold or more since those days. In fact, my
late hero Neil Armstrong once confirmed in an interview that that i
phone in your pocket has, literally, 50,000 times the computing power
as the seventy pound computer on the lunar module, which was used to
navigate to the surface of the moon. My point follows.
Truthfully, with the “thinking
power” we have today, the question is not 'Why can't we?' but 'Why
don't we?' stop world hunger. The answer is nearly as simple as the
question. People on earth are only in hunger because of selfish,
inhumane governments that refuse to feed their people, because of personal greed. Still, even with this situation, the
problem can't be that hard to solve. This is not exactly the Apollo
moon program, after all, which was accomplished, as I inferred, with
1960's technology. With all of our knowledge and lightning-speed,
mega-computing power today, we simply cannot be so stupid as to HAVE
to let even one human being starve to death. If we really are that
dumb, then let's ask our computers, or our kids and grand kids with
their computers, to figure out the answer for us, long before we
greedily design one more new phone, car, or video game.
So, come on, kids. Get your parents out of the way, and SOLVE this. If the problem is greedy
world leaders, and we can't get rid of their greed, then the simplest
thing would be to find a way to make the whole thing profitable for
them. Maybe it could be a kind of 'pay it forward' plan. I don't
know, but I do know that one of you ten year old's can certainly do
it.
I feed the squirrels because I want
to, and because I can. We need to figure out a way to feed humanity,
for the same reasons. To use another cliched term that Neil
Armstrong would have agreed with, it's not rocket science.
1 comment:
I don't mean to contradict, but the problem isn't just greedy world leaders. What it really comes down to is the hearts of mankind, which includes the leaders, but is not limited to them. The only way to solve that problem is a change of heart, which includes not only hearts that don't care about feeding the hungry, but hearts that feel entitled to being fed without any responsibility to contribute in any way. Both conditions reflect the same condition of the greedy leaders— selfishness.
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