Part Three Wages of War: Poverty

Fools romanticize poverty. It makes them feel superior by dispensing pity. They falsely suppose that the worst poverty is being without food, clothing or shelter. Mother Teresa of Calcutta nailed it;

“We think sometimes that poverty is only being hungry, naked and homeless. The poverty of being unwanted, unloved and uncared for is the greatest poverty. We must start in our own homes to remedy this kind of poverty.”

The worst poverty is internal. Bleeding hearts will not fill empty stomachs. States confiscating billionaires’ wealth will not end global poverty. No world organization will end disease. Armies of professors will never eradicate ignorance. Poverty is not a material privation. Poverty does not persist because there is a lack of will to overcome it. Poverty stubbornly persists because it is a weapon of war against human dignity. The weapon of poverty is forged in the dysfunctional home, in the unwanted child, the cheating heart, the denial of human dignity, and the avarice for unneeded three-dimensional objects. War is especially an enemy of the poor. War perpetuates hunger, nakedness, disease and homelessness. Lust, envy, greed, hate, and avarice are the true causes of war incubated and financed through poverty that begins in the soul. And the soul is nurtured in the home, not in the halls of power. Governments handing out money to the poor are like children throwing pails of sand against a relentless tide. Billions of people coveting more three-dimensional objects than they need for a happy life are the problem. Detachment from material things, not consumption of them is the answer to ending both poverty and war. The problems are material. The answers are spiritual.

In 1964, after succeeding the assassinated John F. Kennedy, President Lyndon B. Johnson declared his famous ‘War on Poverty’ with a White House signing of the Economic Opportunity Act. This act was in response to an estimated 19% poverty rate in America at the time. The idea was that throwing trillions of tax dollars at education and healthcare government programs, poverty would be reduced if not completely eliminated in the country. What happened with this completely monetary weaponology against poverty?

In the decade following the 1964 introduction of the war on poverty, poverty rates in the U.S. dropped to their lowest level since comprehensive records began in 1958: from 17.3% in the year the Economic Opportunity Act was implemented to 11.1% in 1973. They have remained between 11 and 15.2% ever since.^[8] It is important to note, however, that the steep decline in poverty rates began in 1959, 5 years before the introduction of the war on poverty (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_Poverty)

And what was the cost of this material only war on poverty? The Cato Institute puts the figure at 15 trillion dollars since the Johnson Administration. America lost the ‘war on poverty’ despite trillions in handouts and trillions more on successive ‘wars of intervention’ from Vietnam to Iraq. Both types of war failed miserably because they lacked a sound spiritual validation of human dignity. As Dr. Martin Luther King put it on April 7, 1967, at the Riverside Church in New York City;

“Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such. Perhaps the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home."^[25]…and you may not know it, my friends, but it is estimated that we spend $500,000 to kill each enemy soldier, while we spend only fifty-three dollars for each person classified as poor, and much of that fifty-three dollars goes for salaries to people that are not poor. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor, and attack it as such."^[26]

But how do you fight a war on war itself? How do you eliminate poverty as a wage of war? Handing out money obviously doesn’t work. In fact, some economists, like Milton Freedman, argued that Johnson’s war of poverty was just as much failed interventionism in the U.S. economy as Vietnam was to the political stability in South East Asia;

"the government sets out to eliminate poverty, it has a war on poverty, so-called "poverty" increases. It has a welfare program, and the welfare program leads to an expansion of problems. A general attitude develops that government isn't a very efficient way of doing things."^[17]

No. Fighting external poverty will not stop war. Eliminating internal poverty, poverty of the soul, will stop war. It is a matter of individual souls evolving from the external world to the internal world. The soul that does not know why it lives is the soul that leads a meaningless life. The soul that leads a meaningless life is a slave-soul to material things that can never satisfy. Such a soul is poor and a pawn of war.

There is only one thing that can destroy the soul and that is alienation from human dignity. Feeding the body and starving the soul will not cure this alienation. The homeless are not naked stinking from urine because they lack money to buy more booze. They are homeless because they lack mental and spiritual nourishment. Giving them ‘spare-change’ perpetuates their poverty, foul nakedness, and life in a box. So, whenever you see a ‘do-gooder’ tossing money at bums on the street what you are witnessing are two barren souls, both poor of spirit, languishing in the illusion that only the external world exists and has any value. We should not cry at the death of a body because that mortal coil is then beyond suffering and pain. Rather, we should cry every moment we see good intentions neglecting the soul that is eternal.

If you want to end war, hunger, disease, and material poverty, go inside yourself, and nurture your soul inside the soul of others.

Addendum: There are no quantifications possible for the exact number of spiritually impoverished souls out of the 7.1 billion human bodies on this planet. However, given the current level of war, ignorance, stupidity, hunger, slavery, homelessness and material avarice, my guess is that the true number is right around 7 billion.

According to DoSomething.org’s global poverty campaign page here are the brutal facts about material poverty: Their motto is: “Do something to make the world suck less.”

1. Nearly 1/2 of the world’s population — more than 3 billion people — live on less than $2.50 a day. More than 1.3 billion live in extreme poverty — less than $1.25 a day.

2. 1 billion children worldwide are living in poverty. According to UNICEF, 22,000 children die each day due to poverty.

3. 805 million people worldwide do not have enough food to eat. Food banks are especially important in providing food for people that can’t afford it themselves. Run a food drive outside your local grocery store so people in your community have enough to eat.

4. More than 750 million people lack adequate access to clean drinking water. Diarrhea caused by inadequate drinking water, sanitation, and hand hygiene kills an estimated 842,000 people every year globally, or approximately 2,300 people per day.

5. In 2011, 165 million children under the age 5 were stunted (reduced rate of growth and development) due to chronic malnutrition. Preventable diseases like diarrhea and pneumonia take the lives of 2 million children a year who are too poor to afford proper treatment.

6. As of 2013, 21.8 million children under 1 year of age worldwide had not received the three recommended doses of vaccine against diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis.

7. 1/4 of all humans live without electricity — approximately 1.6 billion people.

8. 80% of the world population lives on less than $10 a day.

9. Oxfam estimates that it would take $60 billion annually to end extreme global poverty--that's less than 1/4 the income of the top 100 richest billionaires.

10.The World Food Program says, “The poor are hungry and their hunger traps them in poverty.” Hunger is the number one cause of death in the world, killing more than HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis combined.

Sources:

“Poverty entails fear and stress and sometimes depression. It meets a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts that is something on which to pride yourself, but poverty itself is romanticized by fools.”

J. K. Rowling