Here and Now with Francis 6/14/16 (food, hunger, poverty, solidarity, sympathy, charity)

We need to be reminded that food discarded is, in a certain sense stolen, from the table of poor and the starving.

From the address

We need to be reminded that food discarded is, in a certain sense stolen, from the table of poor and the starving.We live in an interconnected world marked by instant communications.  Geographical distances seem to be shrinking.  We can immediately know what is happening on the other side of the planet.  Communications technologies, by bringing us face to face with so many tragic situations, can help, and have helped, to mobilize responses of compassion and solidarity.  Paradoxically though, this apparent closeness created by the information highway seems daily to be breaking down.  An information overload is gradually leading to the “naturalization” of extreme poverty.  In other words, little by little we are growing immune to other people’s tragedies, seeing them as something “natural”.  We are bombarded by so many images that we see pain, but do not touch it; we hear weeping, but do not comfort it; we see thirst but do not satisfy it.  All those human lives turn into one more news story.  While the headlines may change, the pain, the hunger and the thirst remain; they do not go away. ... We need to “de-naturalize” extreme poverty, to stop seeing it as a statistic rather than a reality.  Why?  Because poverty has a face!  It has the face of a child; it has the face of a family; it has the face of people, young and old.  It has the face of widespread unemployment and lack of opportunity.  It has the face of forced migrations, and of empty or destroyed homes. We cannot “naturalize” the fact that so many people are starving.  We cannot simply say that their situation is the result of blind fate and that nothing can be done about it.  Once poverty no longer has a face, we can yield to the temptation of discussing “hunger”, “food” and “violence” as concepts, without reference to the real people knocking on our doors today.  Without faces and stories, human lives become statistics and we run the risk of bureaucratizing the sufferings of others.  Bureaucracies shuffle papers; compassion deals with people. [full text]