Ignorance is never blissful

A legal family member of mine recently posted something on Facebook that really disturbed me:

“Shame on you America: the only country where we have homeless without shelter, children going to bed without eating, elderly going to without needed meds, and mentally ill without treatment—yet we have a benefit for the people of Haiti on 12 TV stations? 99% won’t have the guts to copy and repost this!”

I had to read it several times to make sure of the tone and meaning of the statement. It made me so angry. I immediately went looking for statistics to disprove this most ignorant of statements. I looked up poverty levels by country and found this. According this graph we’re ranked 121 out of 141 countries reporting. There are 120 countries that have a higher percentage of people living below the poverty line. I’m sure our numbers have fluctuated since 2004, but so have the other countries’. Right away you can see that we aren’t the only ones with “homeless without shelter, children going to bed without eating, elderly going to without needed meds, and mentally ill without treatment.” Soon anger turned into pity. To think that someone who lives in his own place, has food on his own table for he and his son, and who has a job can say something like that is pathetic. What is he doing to help those in this country? What is wrong with helping others? Isn’t that our job as citizens of the world? Isn’t that we’re called to be as human beings—caring, helpful, sympathetic?
I saw the benefit on all those channels. I was initially annoyed by it, but after traveling from channel 2 to 68 I realized that it wasn’t just on the major networks, but on various cable channels. I was impressed. I went up and down to see just how many channels were airing this. I thought it was brilliant. To witness the level of caring and humanity was impressive. The best way to reach Americans is through the TV or internet and to have something on almost every channel doesn’t give us a chance to escape it, we can’t run from it, we can’t hide from it lest we turn off the TV—and that’s close to blasphemy. I am impressed by all the help Americans have given to the country of Haiti, especially since it’s during one of the worst recessions in our country’s history. To look past our difficulties and help out people who are facing worse times than we are. We have military there, we have celebrities flying supplies there (Travolta flew a plane of supplies), and former Presidents calling for more, challenging our people to give more because more is needed and we are a country that can afford to give more.
I feel sorry for that family-member, but I feel more for the people of Haiti. Jesus said we would always have to poor, but he should have added that we would always have the ignorant. Oh well.