More poverty than we thought...

The Economist relates a World Bank study that claims that $1.00/day is not a good benchmark for extreme poverty. After extensive research on cost of living in various countries, they've reset the mark at $1.25/day.

By this new standard, the number of people in the world who suffer Extreme Poverty is 1,400,000,000. That's 1.4 billion people - 400,000,000 more than previously estimated.

So, the number of people in the world who are extremely poor is four times bigger than the entire population of America.

Just thought you all should know.

On Language and Transcendence

This is just a quick post, but is a snapshot of a massive thought I've been pushing into.

I've talked a lot lately about love - the kind of love that Jesus described when he said "Love your neighbor as yourself."  I often say that it means caring for another person the same way that you care for yourself.  I say that it's the foundational virtue, that it's the greatest commandment, that God is love.

I'm always thinking of new ways to describe it because I build understanding through description.  The other day I was describing what I meant by love and found myself using the term "transcendent."  Love, I said, is transcendent; its goal is for someone to transcend himself so as to see himself and others in their natural equality.  And having said it, I was a little taken aback at how 'eastern' I sounded.

Transcending the self is of prime importance in Hindu and Buddhist traditions.  In my understanding, "Nirvana" can be passably defined as transcending the self.  And here I was describing Jesus' teachings in the same terms, and being very impressed by well how those terms embraced his message.

In fact, my current favorite description of love is: the transcendent virtue.  To love is to act upon the observation that those around you deserve your care as much as you do.  Love is transcendence.

If transcendence, the means and ends of much eastern religion, is so similar to love, the means and ends of much western religion, I wonder how many other similarities we aren't seeing.  I wonder how many of our differences, which we feel must be solved through persuasion and debate (or worse), could be aptly overcome by a good translator.

A house burning

The beginning of a song I started writing a couple days ago:

There's a house burning across the street
I think I hear people dying
And I watch its glow upon my feet
And wonder why I'm not crying

These lyrics surfaced on my consciousness while driving through Balboa Park earlier this week. I wasn't trying to create at the time - they sang themselves to me.

One week ago I got news that a man I used to work with in northern Uganda was brutally murdered. Though I was not especially close with him I did appreciate him, and the news affected me deeply. It sat me down and laid out before me, once again, all the disparity between our wealthy homeland and places like northern Uganda, the great gap between our opportunities and theirs, between our vast array of choices and their imprisonment in cycles of poverty and violence.

Sitting here in San Diego I am impotent to address this tragedy; I can not offer comfort or commiseration, peace or vengeance. I can not be there to celebrate his life or help lay him in the finality of the open earth.

One thing I can do is live my life with constant remembrance of our suffering neighbors in Uganda, in Sudan, Congo, and Somalia, in Sierra Leone and Cote d'Ivoire, in Burma and North Korea, and in hundreds of other locales throughout the globe, letting our common humanity and innate equality inform my choices.

I realized last week, though, that I haven't been doing this. Many of my decisions have the oily sheen of self-absorption, even though I know better than most how little I need my own concern, and how much others might rightly benefit from it.

Moreover, I realized again that my empathy is extremely limited (empathy in this case synonimizing with love or selflessness). Though I have seen great suffering around the world, my attention seems so easily lulled away from anything of consequence. Hence, I believe, the song lyrics that my subconscious delivered up to me: "I wonder why I'm not crying."

Perhaps these are the growing pains of a heart. More to come on these themes.