Let me cut to the chase: We are able to drive our cars with relatively cheap gasoline (extracted through wars and support of dictatorships that starve their people), eat our inexpensive food (through subsidies that ensure farmers in poor countries can’t compete) and maintain our large homes (by heating and cooling them with fossil fuels that degrade the world’s environment while lecturing the rest of the world on the need to not cut down the rain forests) because people in developing countries are being asked to die for us to do so. I don’t mean that in any figurative sense. We are maintaining our lifestyles by consuming the people of the world.

Recently, I saw a movie called, “The End Of Poverty?” The question mark is in the title because whether poverty will ever end is very much in question. “For the poor will never cease to be in the land,” Jesus is quoted as saying in Deuteronomy 15:11. “The End Of Poverty?” explains why. It offers no hope or possibility. The film suggests the poor are doomed.

The film states that they are doomed because, in the West, our existence requires keeping millions of people in the world in poverty. We don’t do this intentionally, of course. Poverty is a byproduct of our economic system. We are benign monsters.

In the United States specifically, we have 5% of the world’s population and consume 30% of the world’s natural resources. Those resources are extracted from the developing world. We rely on the exploitation of the people and resources in the developing countries to sustain our standard of living.

Yes, we give loans to developing countries to help them improve the lives of their people. These loans rarely make a difference because, to repay these loans, we demand that the debtor countries tax their people and give us control of their natural resources in payment of the debts.

As the movie makes clear, this has been going on since at least 1492 (where have we heard that year before?), when the Spanish started colonizing the world. Or, as a union leader in the movie, “Wall Street” says, “The rich have been doing it to the poor for centuries.”

The poor are doomed because we demand to be rich. Our cars consume their oil. Our inexpensive food is maintained by keeping their food out. Our gold and silver comes from their mines. In return, we give them our pollution, our military occupations, lack of education and birth defects.

And the situations is going to get worse as China, India and others demand their share of the developing world’s resources so that they can have our lifestyle.

Driving less, buying compact fluorescent light bulbs, turning up the thermostat in summer and down in winter, living in smaller homes, etc. will all make a difference.

But the biggest difference will only occur when we in the West decide that having people die so that we can live is intolerable.

QUESTIONS? COMMENTS? LJBARKAN@THEPIVOTALFACTOR.COM

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Reprinted by permission of the author, Larry Barkan: http://www.conflictresolutiontraining.net