Over fall break, I spent some time in Chicago. As I was
walking down the street, there were many people asking for my attention. A
mother with three sleeping children on the sidewalk held up as sign asking to
help her family. A wounded man asked for some money to receive medical help. They were unbelievably poor, while people who walked
right past them wore designer clothes that cost a fortune, went to fancy
performances, and ate at expensive restaurants. They were able to afford a $5
cup of coffee, but could not offer even a single dollar or moment of attention
to the people suffering in front of their faces. Do they really believe that
those people were on the streets because of their actions? Do they really
believe that society can allow you to work your way up to the top? I suppose if
you have always been rich, you may not realize the obstacles one encounters
when they are poor. What about the innocent children? Have they already had a
chance to improve their lives? Will they be able to receive a necessary
education to allow them to improve their lives? Maybe the rich people who do
not give to the poor think that someone else is going to help them. Maybe they
simply have no compassion for the suffering of others. I, for one, believe that
those people have done everything that they thought was the best thing for them
to do at the moment they made the decision to do so. I blame society for the
awful position they are in, specifically neoliberalism and greed. When I think
of neoliberalism and greed, I think about the transnational corporations with
questionable ethics. It is the same sort of behavior.
Maybe those people
and corporations are simply uneducated about the issues at hand. Another person
I ran into was a man shouting about protecting our environment. He was wearing
a jacket with a logo on it and holding a clipboard. He walked up to me and
asked me to support his organization, Greenpeace. I had never heard of them
before. He said they supported protecting the polar bears, reducing emissions
that buses produced, and that genetically modified organisms, GMOs, were bad. I
suppose that to a person who is uneducated and uninformed, this might seem like a great
organization. He was upset when I refused to give money to an organization I
had never heard of before without doing research on it first.
On Thursday night, I spent time talking with my friend in
choir, Emma Kaehler. She is studying agriculture. She told me about how there is no evidence to
prove that GMOs are unhealthy at all. She says that she has read through many
of the studies that have been done and has seen no scientific proof that they
are actually harmful. People have only ever speculated that they might be
harmful. In fact, she told me about a GMO called “golden rice.” It is a type of
rice that was bred to include vitamin A. We have already read that vitamin A
deficiency accounts for many childhood deaths across the globe. Many children
are so poor they can only afford rice, which does not offer enough nutrients.
It turns out that people who oppose GMOs also oppose golden rice. Greenpeace is
one of those organizations.
http://www.goldenrice.org/
Emma goes on to explain that the only people who oppose GMOs
and golden rice are those who are rich and are not suffering from malnutrition,
such as vitamin A deficiency. I would say that this kind of false thinking must
be the result of institutionalization.
There is nothing wrong showing compassion and giving to the Have-Nots. It is just human to do so in my opinion. I had the opportunity to travel a little bit (France, Germany, Belgium, Holland, China and neighboring countries to Ghana and I can confidently there is a new generation of people who beg in the streets especially in big cities. In the past people in the streets begging were genuine and really do need help. Today this act of begging in the street has taken a new form. It is a new kind of informal economic activity that even "Abled" bodies feign disability and do. It is a way of earning money quicker by playing on people's emotions so compassionate people become confused about who is genuinely asking for help. Due to this unfortunate complexity of the true face of beggars , people have become reluctant in giving money out to anyone in the streets. Most times, money given out in the streets are not spent for the intended actions for which they put up sign boards or what have yous! It is a pathetic situation but should the Haves be blamed for the fate of the Have Nots?
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