"Why do you think our country is in the state it is, regarding hunger, health, obesity and poverty? What major or underlying issues do you feel are the ones we need to address to help eliminate poverty?"

This was the prompt for  this weeks VISTA reflection.  My housemate and I laughed a bit over this because it's a pretty tall order! As if anybody really has the single answer, or that it could even be expressed in a blog.  Nevertheless, we both understand the importance of reflections like this and of critically thinking about our issues so that we can, together, work to solve them.  It's not really up to one of us to brilliant expose the root causes of and best solutions to poverty in our country, but it was funny to pretend it was anyway.

As John Green would say, "The truth resists simplicity."

Hunger, health, obesity, and poverty.  Those are four MAJOR complex issues.  But  they are all asked in one question because they are largely inseparable.  Which makes them all that much more difficult to address because no one issue will be solved until the other three are.  And I would definitely add a fifth to this list: environmental quality.  This too is vital if we're going to solve the other 4 problems and we won't get anywhere with them until we start considering environmentalism as part of the group.  


I said this could not all be expressed in one little blog post (dear God there are ENDLESS numbers of books written on these topics!) so this is going to be rather limited.  


To begin with, let us acknowledge that these are not 21st century problems, like they are sometimes thought to be.  They are ancient problems, even obesity, though admittedly that specific facet has reached epic proportions in the last half a century.  What is different is that now we believe that these issues are not inevitable and they are not the natural order.  We believe that every person has the basic right to enough food to live on and a minimum quality of life.  We also recognize that society has the tools to make that a reality and the fact that a large portion of human beings still live without these basic rights is a choice we have made (or perhaps failed to make).  These ideas have come to us through our changing cultural values of the equality of mankind; and that is a very 20th century idea.  Yet even though we've obviously now decided that this state of affairs is unacceptable, we still can't figure out how to change it.  And that, in my opinion, is because we are trying to fix them through the offices of the systems that created them.  These are ancient systems. Systems that emphasize the individual and not the community, systems that define success as an amassing of personal advantages, like wealth or objects or a bigger living space.  If you think about it, you realize these are evolutionary instincts gone wrong.  Thinking about the individual is fine in the State of Nature, but we left that and chose society in order to better provide for ourselves and better protect ourselves.  We needed to stop thinking individually then but we've never quite managed it.  In a way, we are both independent of the ecological web and still very much a part of it, which is a confusing place to be.  We've been able to escape most of the roughest parts of life in the web by making ourselves top of the food chain, learning to protect ourselves from diseases and physical injuries, mastering the creation of stable shelter, the production of plenty of food, etc. etc.  And so I think that makes us think that we aren't part of a system anymore, rather that we are above it.  Nature has always been something to be conquered and tamed and we forgot our place in it and the new responsibilities that came with that choice.  


This getting so complicated I'm losing even myself.  But when it comes right down to it, I think our main problem is the belief that we have to climb over each other to keep our head above water, and get what we need and want.  And we don't believe that we can all rise there together.  


Now, that is an underlying issue that is more difficult to address than any of the 5 mentioned at the beginning.  So what we have to do in the mean time, while our culture slowly comes around, is work to provide those with nothing the means to make themselves what they need.  To me, this means first and foremost addressing environmental issues, since they are so ingrained with social justice issues.  Good soil and no poisonous water, chemicals, or air means more and better food and a healthier and more productive life.  That, in turn, leads to more economic opportunities, which leads to more political rights and representation.  The earth is at our feet and it has to be the base of our pyramid to quality life too.