What Would You Do?

I had run out of ideas. I was teaching a three-week civic leadership course to a group of bright but generally well-heeled high schoolers, and I couldn’t get them to understand the complexity of poverty.

As far as they were concerned, poor people simply chose to be poor or were too stupid to move out of ghettos and into nicer neighborhoods, like those where my students lived. Nothing I threw at them — be it stats about hunger and poverty or the fact CEOs make 500 times their average employee — seemed to faze these kids. To them, society’s problems were someone else’s problems. “I guess we should all be CEOs,” I recall several students saying.

That’s when I got desperate, called together my fellow instructors and set out to prove conclusively that we all have a hand in these issues. Those who have been given more in life — a stable home, a well-funded school, loving parents, intelligence, strength, whatever — have a responsibility to use their gifts.

But how do you prove that to someone who has everything?

We decided to break it down into very small steps.

Thesis 1: Poverty Is Violence

1) Poverty is a lack of resources to meet one’s basic needs.

2) A person lacking resources to meet basic needs suffers physical harm (such as malnutrition, which damages muscle, bone and brain tissue while stunting growth and development).

3) Violence is any action that inflicts physical harm upon another person.

4) If poverty inflicts physical harm and violence is any action that inflicts physical harm upon another person, then poverty is violence.

Thesis 2: Poverty Is Violence Waged by the Privileged Upon the Poor

1) Poverty is a lack of resources to meet one’s basic needs.

2) Privilege is access to resources that exceed one’s basic needs. 

3) The excess resources of the privileged come not only from hard work, but also through a system of privilege that perpetuates their advantage (the privileged have more resources to build wealth, for example).

4) The world’s resources — specifically, the amount of food the world is able to produce — is finite.

5) However, there are enough resources to care for the basic needs of everyone in the world; no one needs to starve, according to the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

6) Still, not everyone has the resources to meet basic needs. Millions of people starve to death every year, including, says the FAO, a child every six seconds. (That means that another couple of children died in the time it took you to read this paragraph.)

7) The reason millions of people are unable to care for their basic needs is that other people — namely, the privileged minority — pursue and amass an excess of resources.

8) To stand by and allow innocent people to suffer and die when you have the excess resources to save them is an act of willful neglect. (Indeed, people who neglect to care for their children can be charged with murder in American courts.)

9) Participating in the amassing of resources that prevents others, particularly children, from acquiring the basics they need to survive, like food, is murder.

10) Poverty is an act of violence, and all those who participate in the process of depriving others of their basic needs share responsibility for the consequences, including others’ suffering and death.

Of course, I’m not the first to articulate the idea that those granted more in life owe a debt to those with less. Gandhi said, “I suggest that we are thieves in a way. If I take anything that I do not need for my own immediate use, and keep it, I thieve it from somebody else.” And now, with politicians jawing over stimulus, unemployment and health care, these ideas will certainly be debated again.

The point is not to shame people or make them hate themselves because they had good fortune. Instead, the goal is to make us realize our privilege comes with a cost and with a responsibility. It’s a call to action.

When I finally presented the proof to my class, the response was mixed. Some dismissed it immediately, saying rich people got no favors in life. Some tacitly agreed with the theories. Others said they felt overwhelmed by the enormity of the world’s problems and didn’t know where to start.

One girl wondered, in all sincerity, whether she should even feed herself when others are unable to eat. I acknowledged I didn’t have all the answers, but certainly we want one less hungry person, not one more. But her question underscored something important: Our goal as privileged people is not to starve ourselves to death or reject all the gifts we were given, but to use the power we have responsibly, humanely.

And, along the way, we should regularly ask ourselves a tough question:

Am I doing enough?