Why I give a shit about poverty

There’s a certain stigma about “doing good”. (At least I feel there is; is it just me?) There’s something unbearably “holier than thou” when it comes to talking about “giving” and “doing more”. It invokes, for me, the image of Minnie Driver playing that over-privileged naïve girl in An Ideal Husband, going on about the charity she’s involved with in one breath and the boys she’s been flirting with in another.

Live 8 and other such fundraisers, featuring celebrities with oh-so serious expressions speaking in hushed tones and slow-motion shots of starving children with Enya on the soundtrack are so easy to roll ones eyes at. They’ve become so common that they’re cliché.

Maybe I’m just insensitive. I know this sounds disgustingly Ayn Rand-ian of me, but in high school, I was involved in community service activities not because I actually cared, but because they would look good on my college application—and I have a sneaking suspicion that that’s how most people felt. After college, I felt that it was rich people who should give—not me. I felt that my living conditions (at the time, I was living with my parents) were the bare minimum of what was humane (lol), and I was struggling to maintain even that. It was the people with ten houses scattered all over the world who should scale down a bit for fuck’s sake.

I related all of this to my step-uncle, who changed my entire perspective in a single conversation. (The next time you think arguing with someone is pointless, who knows: you may be laying the seeds for future ruminations and profound change.) He told me about a documentary about two different high schools: a private school with the wealthiest kids in the city and a public school in one of the poorest neighborhoods.

Although revealing how “the other half lives”—juxtaposing, say, rich kids getting upset about their cars with the poor kids coping with violence—was fascinating in and of itself, the real kicker was the documentarists’ decision to show footage of the poor kids to the rich kids. Even though the rich kids were legitimately touched by their plight, the documentarists asked what the rich kids would be willing to give up in order to rectify the inequality between the two groups, and the rich kids answered, “Nothing.” Not their Mercedes, not their houses, not their private school education. And their reason? Because other people were so much richer than them.

Hm.

I’m sure you’ve seen that thing online (The Global Rich List) where you enter your yearly income and it tells you what percentile of wealth you’re in compared to the rest of the world. And of course, you look at it and marvel at how you’re actually in the top 3% when you feel so poor, and wonder how billions of people could possibly live on less than $3000 dollars a year, let alone $300, and you pity them for a second, but then you go ahead and buy your lunch for $15 and make your car payment of $232 and buy that $75 pair of jeans because you simply have nothing to wear. And why not? Everyone else is doing it. Everyone has a car. No one’s walking around with holes in their clothes. If we did, we’d look stupid. We have to keep up with our peers, right? And that’s exactly the line of thinking of those rich high school kids.

So I started asking myself that question: what would I give up in order to rectify this vast inequality of wealth that clearly exists between me and much of the world? And I began demanding of myself that the answer cannot be “nothing”. If 97% of the world can go without X, then I should be able to go without X, too. I’ve started to buy as little as possible of anything not completely necessary to my survival and donating everything left over to charity. (If any of you had started to wonder why I’ve started to look like crap, this is why.)

I know that thinking about how badly off people are to gain “perspective” is cheesy, but I think it’s less so when it has practical consequences: thinking about how there are places even in my very own city where dozens of people live in the same house makes me a little more forgiving of my apartment, which I share with a roommate and is in close quarters with my ten neighbors. It gives me less of an impulse to run out and get a one-bedroom apartment as soon as I can afford it, or that I should even find a smaller or shittier apartment so I can free up more income to give.

Maybe this sounds a little like “hair shirt” charity, like I’m taking it a little too far, and I know it’s not exactly a tantalizing selling point (definitely not brought up on Live 8—“Get a shittier apartment!!! WOO!!”), but it’s the one that works for me. For me to think that I should get the most I can afford is a logical fallacy that will only perpetuate never, ever giving to others, no matter how rich I get.

To me, this has nothing to do with sympathy or sob stories or Enya; it has to do with fairness (which, luckily, makes it much less goody-two-shoes). Just as it’s not fair that some people travel all over the world, live in lavish mansions and go yachting around the Mediterranean while I have to work at a tedious, mind-numbing job every day, it’s not fair that I actually have my own apartment and my own car while billions of people all over the world live in shacks and eke out a meager existence doing hard manual labor. No matter what Ayn Rand says, I find all of this tremendously unfair.

And yet, it occurred to me that just giving wasn’t enough. I’d heard somewhere that tons of aid to Africa, for instance, gets siphoned off to warlords who use it to buy palaces and weapons and shit. Why the hell do we let that happen?! What are the root causes and systemic problems that prevent the alleviation of extreme poverty in spite of billions of dollars of aid? I decided to solve global poverty right there and headed to the font of all knowledge: Wikipedia.

It was there that I discovered something I’m pretty sure I’d never heard of before: that many impoverished countries—the same ones we’re told to send all this aid to—are billions of dollars in debt to the World Bank, the IMF, and random private creditors. Something like half of every dollar in aid goes towards paying off this debt. It’s like, excuse me?? I’m supposed to give money to these people so it can end up in some banker’s wallet?? Or I’m supposed to help these people so they can keep working on their farms to make money to give to these bankers?? How is that any different from medieval kings living off the sweat of their serfs? In a horrifying twist on the gap between rich and poor, some of those same fat cats tooling around in their yachts aren’t just hoarding all their wealth: their wealth actually COMES FROM the very poor people they should be giving to!!

Lest you think that it’s the poor people’s fault they got into debt in the first place and that they shouldn’t get out of their obligation to pay it off, there are multiple reasons why this is untrue, which I won’t bother to delineate here, but which are thoroughly explained at the website of Jubilee USA, one of the primary organizations campaigning to have all this debt canceled. But really, it’s common sense: bankruptcy as a legal concept exists for a reason: so that people won’t be slaves to their debt their entire lives, but can rather start again from a clean slate. Why isn’t there an international equivalent, by which we can grant the same thing to countries, particularly those whose citizens are suffering so intensely??

So forget Live 8. Forget Bono. Forget even the Red Cross for a moment. Getting these ridiculous loans canceled is the FIRST STEP towards ANY progress in the third world. Anything else will just serve as a band-aid—a badly needed band-aid, but a band-aid nonetheless.

These are the lines of thinking that get me to take action: justice and common sense. It’s not that I have no sympathy; of course I do. That part in Seven Samurai when the guy picks up the rice grain by grain with a quivering hand because they’ll starve to death without it makes me desperate to run to the kitchen and get him a big ol’ bag of rice. And stuff like that is happening all over the world. Right now. But if I’m not willing to make sacrifices and challenge what I deem a “necessity”, sympathy is all I will have to give.

Moreover, the whole situation is so complicated that it demands more than just throwing money at it; it’s about figuring out the best angle, determining what the roots of the problems are so we can get the biggest bang for our buck and our time.

And there’s nothing goody-two-shoes about that.