When giant waves crashed into parts of Asia and Africa the day after Christmas, many Americans tuned in to daily news reports about the disaster and opened their hearts and wallets to those suffering.
America's wealthiest entertainers donated substantial portions of their fortunes to relief funds, NBC gathered A-list entertainers for a television special in a major effort to raise money, and former presidents George H. W. Bush and William Jefferson Clinton lent their distinguished faces to an advertisement to remind people to keep giving.
The upwards of 212,000 people who perished in the tsunami and the millions who were forced into further poverty mobilized the international community to make a magnificent effort in the face of this mammoth disaster.
While the United States can be commended for it's actions in the past month, the exact opposite can be said of our involvement in the United Nation's war on poverty.
In 1970 the world nations came to the agreement that it would take 0.7 percent of the gross national income of each of the world's richest countries to eradicate world poverty. On Jan. 17, the UN published a 3,000-page report that concluded that if the members of the international community stick to the plan, world poverty could be cut in half by 2015 and completely stamped out by 2025.
As of today, only six of the world's 22 wealthiest nations have made commitments to the UN's goal, and only five - Denmark, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Sweden and Norway - have actually contributed the 0.7 percent of their gross national income to developmental aid.
The United States, the second wealthiest nation in the world according to the World Bank, is notoriously absent from the list of international givers. We've only managed to toss 0.15 percent of our gross domestic product into the collection plate.
We have all the traits of a showy and selfish nation. We don't mind putting on a performance, crying, holding rallies and telethons when the world is watching but as soon as the hype dies down we withdraw into self-serving isolation.
We dropped the big bucks when the images of starving Ethiopian children were brought into our living rooms every night, but last year we only contributed $4 million to help raise agricultural activity in that region - not even a drop in the bucket toward helping a nation become better equipped to feed itself.
According to UN reports, 150,000 African children die of malaria every month, a heartrending tragedy in itself, but even more distressing when considering the fact that simple, cheap mosquito nets are all that are needed to save their lives.
All it would take is 0.7 percent of our budget to send billions of children to school, provide food and water for millions of families, and give the world's poorest nations the means to pull themselves back from the brink of destruction.
Our current government has pledged 0.18 percent of our gross national income for 2006.
Even though it is obvious that our government is unmoved, I have to believe that at least half the people in this nation are deeply disturbed by these numbers. But we are content to cluck our tongues and shake our heads and then move on with our day. We've taught ourselves to ignore those Feed The Children infomercials and flip the channel to something less depressing - we can't let starving children ruin our day.
Sure, we can think of a million and one ways to spend our own money on ourselves, and no one is saying we should give the shirts off our backs and then freeze. All I'm wondering is how it can be possible that a country that can spend millions of dollars on a glorified party cannot spare 0.7 percent of its budget to save millions of lives.
The fact that obesity is one of the biggest killers in the United States is something of a karmic justice; while letting our brothers and sisters starve we have nothing left to do but gorge ourselves to death.
