Occupy the Church pt. 3- There are starving kids in Africa

We’ve come to the end of the road with this series on Occupy the Church. It’s amazing to me because really this idea is what started the blog and I can’t believe I’ve stuck with it for so long. I can’t thank you guys enough for reading this and supporting me with your time. I’m going to dive right in here because I promised a shorter post.

You’ve likely seen the pictures on Facebook comparing the Occupy Wall Street protestors to the starving kids in Africa and essentially suggesting that the OWS movement is ridiculous when compared to the struggles of 99% of the world. There are three things I want to establish before we even start dissecting these issues. 1. The famine and destruction that is found in many third world countries is absolutely sickening to me. I hate it and thinking about it makes it hard for me to not just get pissed. 2. There is suffering here in America by many people. It is a quiet suffering that is endured under a cloak of shame and though it is very different from the suffering of people in these third world countries it is suffering to the worst degree. 3. My ideal as a Christian is that all suffering would end, not that only the worst suffering would cease but that even the slightest suffering would find destruction in the light of the LORD. I don’t think we have to settle for one suffering over another when we look toward Christ. He takes it all.

With those things in mind I want everyone to check out this site that has some quality facts about poverty. (http://www.globalissues.org/article/4/poverty-around-the-world#WorldBanksPovertyEstimatesRevised) Again, I’m bad at citing sources so most of the facts will be here and otherwise you can talk about it in the comments.

The way I see it inequality is the source of all poverty. When we look at limits on resources caused by draught and famine they are often worsened when there is a group of people that are considered lesser. India ends up being a great example of this because of their culturally acknowledged caste system. The Dalit people occupy the lowest rung of this system and until recently (and really still currently) there were laws in place that kept them from moving from their caste and into a position that allowed them to seek wealth. Poverty occurs not when there is a lack of resources but rather a clustering a wealth.

You’ve likely heard the term “it takes money to make money”. If we look at poverty and wealth on a graph it makes an exponential curve, meaning there is a certain point where the amount of money you have starts to make more money for itself at a rate that means losing money becomes almost impossible. Let’s say you have 1 billion dollars in a bank account. You can live more comfortably off that interest than most people do on their full time income. So in a capitalist society the ultimate goal would be to get to this point where money is no longer a concern but rather a luxury, to go past the point on the curve so that your wealth is self-sustaining. 

In order to do this you need far more wealth than is necessary for you to live. Let’s say that you make .5% interest a year on your wealth (which is a fairly low APR) and you would normally make $60,000 a year (that is living very comfortable in most of America) you would need to have 18 million dollars in an account just sitting there. That’s a ton of money locked away in an account that you can’t spend but is still held in your name. Now imagine that money was actual resources: food, clothes, medicine, etc., things that most people need. 18 million dollars worth of food is now sitting in a bank somewhere untouched.

This idea is what drives inequality and hinders trickle down economic systems. The money that is stored up by the wealthy and then turned into income ends up not going back into the economy to further growth and employment. That’s why when you get a tax break the government encourages you to spend it. If you save it then we aren’t circulating wealth, but who are the worst offenders of wealth stagnancy? The wealthy of course, they have enough money to make money with it so why would they need to spend that money.

Think of all those times that someone asked “If you had a million dollars but you had to spend it today, what would you buy?” Most people say a house, some people then try to put in other luxuries with that like TVs. The smart ones will go for some sort of investment, knowing it takes money to make money, but ultimately you’d be hard pressed to spend all of that money with out investing some of it, which is a form of saving. Even purchasing a house ends up being an investment. Thus the wealth you had remains stagnant, and really that’s exactly what you want. If it stays stagnant then you stay wealthy.

So the money doesn’t go to the lower class and the lower class ends up getting into this position called “poverty”. When we look at poverty it ends up not just being a matter of income but a function of two things. 1. Inequality as demonstrated before, and 2. A disability in society. The disability to earn more wealth.

When someone reaches the status of “poverty” they essential have gotten to the other end of the exponential curve, the downward curve. If it takes money to make money than losing money loses even more money exponential because you lose opportunity wealth. If a dollar can hypothetically make $1.05 then you lose an extra 5 cents each time you spend a dollar. Now lets take someone who is unemployed in a place like LA. In California the Cost of living is extremely high, I know it’s roughly 39% higher than the cost of living in Missouri. So just by being in LA the amount of money the lose by living here is so much greater than Missouri that no income, even for as little as 3 months, ends up requiring a certain level of debt just to survive, to provide yourself with food or water etc.

Now many of you are probably thinking “America has so many resources though, a person who is unemployed is able to live for free essentially because of all our public utilities.” Even if they are able to survive they are not able to provide for themselves and it ends up pushing them further and further from a place in society where they can provide for themselves because each day is another financial burden they can’t carry. Just because assistance is readily available does not discount them from a place of poverty.

Now we look at solutions to poverty in certain areas. There’s this awesome charity called Heifer International that gives a goat to a family in need and in so doing lifts people out of poverty. They give them one single goat and that provides them away to have income to buy necessities. I can buy a goat here in the US for less than what it costs for my Wii, so if I add up all of my resources I am far wealthier than those who can live off a goat. Right? Not necessarily, because poverty acts more as a state of wealth than a cemented position, it to some extent is like a virus. When you get it and you can’t get a cure then you keep getting sicker and sicker no matter how much your body tries to fight it. So let’s say I have a Wii, which basically cost as much as this goat, and I lose my job. Overtime I start to sell things to maintain my living situation and I finally realize I can sell my Wii for a goat and all my problems will be solved. I will be able to lift myself out of poverty. Well, actually, if I’m living in LA then I have no place to raise that goat and there is no demand for those goat resources like wool or milk, and I can’t sell any of it with out a business license all of which I couldn’t get unless I sold my Wii, my TV, my fridge… oh but wait I can’t store the milk with out the fridge and nobody wants to buy the milk so… I continue to be poor.

These solutions to poverty work in those areas because the cost of living is lower, the demand for those things exists, and the resources necessary to maintain those things are readily available. The poverty of a nation at large makes living in that area cheaper. When we start saying “these people live on a dollar a day.” We also have to take into account that spending that dollar everyday doesn’t lose them nearly as much opportunity cost. Their poverty, to some extent, is easier to fix. This is the idea of relative poverty. When inequality exists in creates poverty and wealth. Neither of which are good.

In the scriptures both poverty and wealth seem to be things that Christ wants to cure. As he goes around healing the blind and feeding the hungry he tells people who are rich to give up their money and tells people who are poor to find wealth in Him. I think there’s this trend in Christianity to abhor wealth and embrace poverty, it’s this idea that God wants everybody to be poor. I by no means am a health and wealth preacher but I think God wants us to be sustained in Him, to have food everyday and to know that He provides it. That is the ideal established in the Garden of Eden is it not? They are wealthy, not as we understand it, but certainly they have stored up riches because God has provided them with abundance. The issue becomes when the abundance or the poverty are sins. Both poverty and wealth end up serving a similar function in society, which is removing some one from actively participating in it. Those who are poor don’t have the financial means to lift themselves out and God makes clear that is not his ideal, those who are rich rely on their wealth and thus have no need for community or partnership and that is also clearly not the ideal.

Both wealth and poverty are like viruses, they eat away us. They function much like sin. When we look at the world not functioning as Christ’s ideal then it should remind of us sin because it is a product of it. Wealth is a product of greed, poverty a product of disaster or laziness, both of which come from this fallen world.

The thing that really gets me, and brings this back to the whole Occupy the Church concept, is how people sitting on Facebook can be so arrogant as to us the example of poverty in a Third World country, which they clearly have little concept of (I’ll be the first to admit I have absolutely no idea what it’s like to be starving) to shoot down others expressing their suffering (that they also have no concept of). They use something like starving kids in Africa to justify their lack of involvement in the suffering of people who live right next to them when they weren’t involved with the suffering of those starving kids either.

I look at the last post and God’s disgust with the complacent, and I can’t help but be even more disgusted by this. To compare sufferings in order to justify complacency is so bafflingly ignorant. When people have done nothing to rectify the suffering that they have caused let alone the suffering that goes on right next door or the suffering that goes on thousands of miles of way then where do they get off disqualifying the actions of those who do express that suffering or who stand with those who do in order to rectify it.

The center of this issue is inequality and that is what we are experiencing here in America as well as over in Africa and it should not continue. We should see the similarities in those two pictures before we see what’s different. This poverty is a product of sin, as is the inequality, as is the wealth.  Christ commissioned us to face this, and to write it off with a picture on Facebook showcasing the struggles side by side is wrong. Do not justify your complacency. The moment we allow these inequalities to take root here is the moment we open the door to a future that looks more like Africa’s present. Let’s not forget that Egypt once stood as this towering city, a monument to wealth and prosperity, and how God led His people out of that slavery.  Our government should not function like this.

So to end out this whole series let me say:

1. I have found myself to be a failure in the midst of all these struggles. I failed to get involved or to really hear the cries of people who were suffering and when I started to listen I heard it even as close as my dear friends.

2. No matter what you believe you should know that something is wrong when people go to the streets to illustrate the inequality of a nation. You can disagree with their solutions and with their actions but you cannot dismiss their struggles.

3. Christ is in all of this. He is with those protestors trying to reveal to them that He is equality, He is justice, He is the solution. Christ is in the boardroom of those banks when they decided to turn away from justice and equality and thus turn away from Him but he still works through this pain as he always has. For those of us who profess that is true than we should be where we He is needed most and be pointing out what we see. I’m here in Montebello and I may just be writing some silly blog but to all who read this please not that I see Christ moving through this and I see a solution in Him.

Thanks for following through this series. And sorry for my ranting.