A wire service report this week showed a single mother in Bangladesh who had advertised to sell one of her eyes to buy food for her starving daughter.
Try to think about that without your blood running cold: human beings selling parts of themselves as a final act of desperation. And that woman is only one of the hundreds of thousands who are slowly starving to death each day.
What happened to the concert fundraisers for Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Sub-Saharan Africa? Have we exhausted our capacity to care and to give? Have we become numb to the plight of millions because the problems are so overwhelming that we don't know where to start?
We burn down the rainforests, clear the jungles, despoil the environment so that we can create new soil-poor farms to feed more mouths. There are just too, too many of us but our leaders ignore the problem at the root of the world's burgeoning troubles: overpopulation.
And in Rome, the new Pope will continue the traditional church doctrine against contraception. How ironic that the horsemen: death, disease, famine, and pestilence, should be loosed on the world by the City of Faith.
About the Author
Virginia Bola is a licensed clinical psychologist with deep interests in Social Psychology and politics. She has performed therapeutic services for more than 20 years and has studied the effects of cultural forces and employment on the individual. The author of an interactive workbook, The Wolf at the Door: An Unemployment Survival Manual, and a monthly ezine, The Worker's Edge, she can be reached at http://drvirginiabola.blogspot.com