Out of Balance in a World of Plenty

As implied in my previous post, I recently finished Brian McLaren's Everything Must Change. Several statistics have seared my awareness. Get this...

• the richest 1% of world owns almost 40% of the total wealth


• the richest 5% owns 70%


• the world's 3 richest individuals' wealth equals the combined GDP of the world's 48 poorest countries


• 6 million children under 5 years old starve each year (“an annual unacknowledged holocaust”)


• $25 billion could save 8 million poor people per year; in 2000 the top 400 US households earned $61 billion in annual earnings. (these 400 families could save 8 billion people and still have $44 billion leftover)


• $80 billion could provide clean water, basic health care, basic education and basic nutrition for everyone on earth; this is less than 10% of world's military budget – and so far US has spent $200 billion in Iraq (as of 2007).

McLaren, Brian D. Everything Must Change: Jesus, Global Crises and a Revolution of Hope. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2007. (pp. 232-33, 249, 250)

I have heard that the gap between the rich and the poor in just America is the widest it has been since 1929. But these figures really brought home to me how far out of balance we have become (and those figures don't even include what has happened since the global financial and hunger crises of the past year).

It's easy for me to begin pointing fingers at the CEOs of Wall Street. But I have to face that, while most of the world lives off of $1-2 per day, it takes at least $60 per day for me and mine to make it.

Something is out of kilter.

I recently heard a fine upstanding American citizen share how his car stereo kept getting stolen. He drove a beautiful Audi and insisted on having the top of the line car stereo. But he constantly found his window busted and his radio swiped.

After reading Brian's book, I couldn't help but wonder if maybe he was not the one getting robbed, but rather that he (and the rest of us) were robbing the poorest of the poor by our insistence on such inequitable lifestyles. We the rich live in fear of the poor and then feel justified to build borders, walls, fences and burglar alarms to feel safe and protected in a world where many can't even get a clean cup of water.

Something is definitey out of kilter.