3. If you agree with me that no one person has more value than another, then what exactly is your objection to helping someone in another country?
If you agree that their life is as valuable and important as yours, and if they are starving or dying of preventable illness or being sold into slavery, shouldn’t we help?
Do we not have an obligation to do what we can, no matter where hurting people live? Wouldn’t we want someone to help us if we were unlucky enough to find ourselves in such circumstances?
What does it say about us if we refuse? What does it say about you?
It is true that some in America are suffering. They are without work and without health insurance. People lose their homes to fires, storms and bankruptcy. Our systems, like child and family services, Medicaid, public schools and food stamps need to be better funded, and better thought out.
But.
We have programs like food stamps, Medicaid and child services. Our babies get immunized against killer diseases like hepatitis, measles, whooping cough and tetanus. The mosquitoes in the U.S. might carry West Nile virus, but they don’t carry malaria, dengue fever or Japanese encephalitis.
We can drink water from the tap and from the water hose without fearing we will pick up a parasite that could kill us or infect us for life. We have sewer systems and trash pick-up instead of trenches of waste running along the street that we have to step across when we enter and leave any building in town. We have closets full of shoes. We have antibiotics.
People in the developing world don’t have what we have. Not by any stretch of the imagination.
Which leads me to another comment I received while on my trip; this comment read, in part, “I don’t see anybody from Sri Lanka over here helping our less fortunate.”
OK. Let’s break this down.
