Learning to suffer just a little bit

We had been in our home stay for a week before Rose let me know that most of the family members were only eating two small meals a day. It was hard to keep track of such things in a two-story home with 17 extended family members from three different nuclear families. They were giving us three good meals every day, and at least some family members were always eating with us. But Rose started talking to one of the daughters about her daily eating habits, and came to realize that part of the reason they always shuffled us between the two different eating areas and had us eating each meal with different people was because there wasn’t enough food for many of the family members to eat three meals. This thought affected me a lot, and I started eating less every meal so there would be more left over (though making sure to compliment the food a ton still so they wouldn’t think I didn’t like it!). A few times this left me quite hungry long before the next meal came around, but it honestly wasn’t much of a burden at all.

I have rarely suffered for others. It was only in Lent of this year that I began experimenting with going hungry occasionally for the sake of other people. I have fasted regularly in the past, but for my own spiritual growth or as a corporate Church discipline. What would it mean to go hungry sometimes not because I lacked the money, but because I desired to give it to someone who goes hungry far more often than myself? What would it mean to stop buying all the extra food I don’t need – desserts, bottled drinks, soft drinks, coffees, fast food, restaurant food, anything else expensive – and use the savings to help those who don’t get their basic nutrition? I think that giving up most of these things is not really suffering, since I’ll probably feel better without them, but might it be worth testing whether I can do it even to the point of just a tiny bit of suffering?

What does it feel like to not eat every time I am hungry? Like I said, I’ve only started doing this a few months ago, and only in little bits and pieces. But I think it’s really important, and my experience in the slums here makes me want to stretch it further. When families who only eat two small meals a day take you into their homes and keep generously feeding you three, it makes you think twice about all the stuff you eat that you don’t need.


p.s. – The communities I’ve been living in for the past several weeks are current celebrating Ramadan (“Ramzan” here). Their fasting this month inspired one of my friends here in the slum to fast for 24 hours each week himself – not in religious solidarity with his Muslim friends, but in practical solidarity with those he knows who do not have enough to eat. He is 14 years old. He also has been a vegetarian for several years now in part due to concerns over world poverty and the amount of land use/grain feed it takes to support animal consumption, and he once inspired his family to live an entire month on the same $110 budget as their poor neighbors. This is the different perspective on life that growing up among the half of the world in poverty gives you. How many kids his age could grow up among the constant American messages of “eat eat eat! drink drink drink! Consume consume consume!” and hold onto enough perspective to make the same sacrifices?

Prophet of Doom

We can’t keep going on with business as usual like everything will be okay.

I watched television Friday morning, getting a rare glimpse of the news. The news programs were awash in stories of stock market collapse – starting in the United States and spreading across Asia. The causes of the market worries were employment and recession concerns exacerbated by the American political fight over debt. And the talk was about how and when it was going to be fixed - when the economy was going to start booming again and how the stock markets were going to start trending up again.

What if those aren't the solutions we need?

Consider the following:


1) Our economic health is dependent on constant growth. When the economy fails to grow, we declare a “recession” and worry abounds. Even low-level growth is considered insufficient – one major Republican presidential candidate recently proclaimed that his goal was 5% annual economic growth – a rate that would lead to the economy doubling in size every 14 years.

2) As the economy grows, the rich capture an ever-larger slice of the total. In America, the take-home income of the richest 0.1-0.01% of the population has increased 3-5 times over what it was in 1980, while the take-home income of the poorest 60% of the population hasn’t grown at all. Worldwide, the wealthiest 1% now control over 40% of the world’s wealth, and their portion is increasing every year.

3) We are getting fewer jobs out of our economic growth. Corporations are increasing efficiency and reducing labor costs, thereby allowing more things to be provided with fewer employees, ensuring the greatest profits for upper-level management and shareholders. As a result, economic growth no longer results in a comparable increase in jobs, though economic recession is still used as a reason to significantly reduce jobs.

4) Per American, our country is consuming about six times as many resources as we did in the 1950s and 50-200 times the resources that the residents of our own era's poorest nations consume. Despite the greatly increased consumption, Americans aren’t any happier than they were in the ‘50s. Yet the vast majority of Americans continue to make it their goal to consume more. For every family willing to move into a smaller house, get rid of their cars, and eat simpler food, there are ten families at every economic level who are trying to climb the economic ladder and consume more and more.

5) The world does not have enough space or resources to support this. If the whole world were to reach American standards in the next few decades, we would be using forty times as many resources as we are today. And we’re going to run out of resources (many mined metals, fossil fuels, sustainable fisheries, forested land, clean water, agricultural space, etc.) at the current pace, let alone a pace 40 times greater! It would take the land space of three Earths to sustain an all-American world even if we didn’t leave anything for the natural world, and the nonrenewable resources would still run out. The issues of land, water, energy, pollution, fossil fuel availability, mining, fisheries, deforestation, global warming, etc. are coming from so many different directions that no number of technological breakthroughs will solve all of them without a significant change in lifestyle.

6) The mechanisms of capitalism ensure that without significant outside interference, every one of these trends will continue. Capitalist economies will demand more growth, the rich will be better positioned to gain from that growth than the poor, and economic efficiency will trend towards fewer and fewer jobs for the same amount of growth. These economies will keep consuming more and more resources with fewer and fewer people benefitting from the gains until the whole thing collapses.


Where are we going with this? As individuals, are we going to keep consuming more and more at the expense of others, not to mention future generations? As voters and opinion-makes, will we let every American election hinge on whether or not the economy continues to grow fast enough to satisfy the rich and middle-class? As Americans, will we keep consuming far more than everyone else and keep promoting our consumption model across the world as the goal for all others to follow? Are we ready for where this is all going to lead, and do we understand who is going to suffer the most when it all comes apart?

This is only a small summary of one aspect of the rationales that are coalescing for me right now. There is much more from the Bible, historical and modern Christian teachings, political concerns, economic concerns, environmental concerns, and what I’ve seen over the last few years in America’s media, Bangkok’s commercialism, and India’s slums that convince me that we are seriously on the wrong track. It would take many hours to summarize all the things that are bothering me about this, but a great number of the issues involved could be covered with a careful reading of Collapse by Jared Diamond, Mustard Seed vs. McWorld by Tom Sine, and Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger by Ronald Sider. I don’t agree with everything in all three of those books, but together they cover the practical message of the unsustainability of the path we are on and the Godly directive of the path we should be on instead. Some of the numbers I mention here came from those books, as well as Unequal Democracy by Larry M. Bartels. The first three books also begin to deal with some of the things we could start doing to get on the right path, and I would strongly recommend Freedom of Simplicity by Richard Foster, Making Room by Christine Sine, and The New Monasticism by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove to keep developing more ideas.