Perspective is all.

Tonight I bought a rotisserie chicken and brought it home and dutifully pulled all the meat off the bones before offering it to my family. Then I boiled the remaining carcass down to get broth for future soups, etc.

There was a lot left: boiled-down bones with scraps of meat still clinging. What to do with it? Throw it out with the next trash pick-up, of course.


But then it occurred to me that, in certain parts of the world, children -- and their parents -- would be fighting over such leftovers, not just plucking the last strips of chicken meat from the bones but probably sucking the bones themselves for any hint of nutrition.

I remembered my mother, back in the 1950s, saying that children were starving in Korea (or wherever) and that I should be ashamed for not eating my peas. "People around the world are starving," she'd say, and, being a kid, I brushed it off. Yeah, right.

I'm not a kid now, and I realize that people really ARE starving. It's hard to understand if your only scope is the grocery stores of America, where we have so much to eat, and at cheap prices. And where/when we probably throw away as much as we eat.

In this age of photos shopped around the globe, it's hard to avoid the image of someone actually starving in some other country. I'm pretty sure that you and I don't know what it would be like to starve, but the pictures -- if you care to look at them -- paint a pretty vivid picture. Kids with visible ribs and eyes too big for their sockets. Unlucky enough to have been born in some poor country instead of in L.A. or Denver or Charlotte or Tulsa.

I've been through periods in my own life, when I was younger, when I was on food stamps, those pieces of paper you present at the grocery store in exchange for whatever you bought, and which identify you as poor. They're honored, but you may be looked at in the check-out line in a different way. But what if you were that poor, or poorer, and there were no food stamps?

What if you had children and no money and were living under a thatched roof you'd fashioned yourself from whatever big fronds you'd gathered from the forest? What if you were a woman with children whose husband had been murdered by a government goon squad or by rebels fighting against that government?

What if you had to catch small animals or frogs or fish just to live? And then figure out how to cook them? And hope that while you were out gathering fire wood, no vigilante band of young men drunk on cheap booze or narcotics didn't catch you out there and rape you? Or what if they came into your make-shift camp and raped not just you but your ten-year-old daugter? What if they then killed you all with machetes?

Can you really imagine your own family living that way?

Of course not. None of us can. But that's the way lots of people live their lives in this world we all inhabit. We can't place ourselves in those circumstances, because we can't bring ourselves to imagine it, but it happens, too often, everywhere. And we in the "civilized" world don't know how to respond, how to make a difference, how to help.

So what to do? Well, I guess we can donate to organizations that are recognized and sponsored, where our money won't end up in the hands of the despots who initiated the violence, etc., but I think it's more important, on a personal level, to understand that perspective is all: we are lucky not to have been born into such situations and should try to figure out ways to help those who, through no fault of their own, are. Perspective is all. We are lucky to have what we have. Others are unlucky enough not to have been born that way. Just thinking about that injustice is a start.

My mother's point, and mine, is that we should adopt the bigger view, the world view, the whole human view. My ills are my own, but they're related to the ills of everyone on earth. We're all in this together. We are humans on the only known inhabited planet. Maybe there are others out there in the universe, but we haven't discovered them yet. So far as we know, in the 21st century, using the best minds we have available to us, we are the only planet with life as we know it. I don't know about your mind, but mine is boggled by not just that concept but by the cruelty we inflict on each other. Surely there's a better way. Don't you think?

Perspective is all. We in America turn on a tap, and water flows abundantly. In parts of the world, women walk for miles with heavy jugs on their head to get water from a central source.

Can you imagine you or your daughters doing that?

Can you imagine gathering firewood to cook a meal of squirrel?

Can you imagine boiling bark from trees to get some kind of nourishment for your kids?

What? No Ding-Dongs? No pizza? Oh no, not KFC again tonight!

Perspective is all.


There isn't much we can do to relieve the suffering of the millions around the globe who have it so much worse than we do -- except, as I said, by contributing money to respeceted agencies who work tirelessly to make that suffering less -- but one thing we can do is not to pity ourselves too much before we think about those less fortunate than us.

Tomorrow I'll drive through Taco Bell just to keep from having to make supper. In some other parts of the world, someone is digging for edible worms.

Persective is all.