God and the Poor

I'm reading a book about my latest personal hero, Paul Farmer, a doctor and medical anthropologist from Harvard who -- in his 20's and 30's -- created a very successful health care system, despite insurmountable odds, in Haiti, and has since spread the model to Peru, Russia and other extremely poor countries battling AIDS and multi-drug resistent TB. He was determined to create solutions to the outrageously wrong distribution of wealth in the world, and the fact that the rich, who have good housing, good nutrition and clean water, have access to the best health care, and the poor, who have bad housing, bad nutrition and dirty water, get lousy health care, if any at all. It's completely upside down, an AMC as he calls them: area of moral clarity.

So when I read that a 12-year old homeless boy died in Montgomery County two weeks ago of an infected tooth, because not one single dentist out of 26 contacted would provide him the care he needed for free, I realized that if it can happen in the richest county in one of the richest states in the richest country in the world, what chance do places like Africa and Haiti have?

Then I saw a video of Bono receiving the Chairman's Award from the NAACP this week -- check it out, it's on YouTube -- and he addressed this very issue in the most eloquent way. Here's what he said, and here's an idea of God that I can definitely get behind. Paul Farmer, a lapsed Catholic like me, thinks this way about God too...

"Whatever thoughts you have about God, who he is or even if God exists, most will agree that God has a special place for the poor. The poor are where God lives.

God is in the slums, in the cardboard box where the poor play house. God is where opportunity is lost and lives shattered. God is with the mother who has infected her child with a virus that will take both their lives. God is under the rubble, in the cries we hear during wartime.

God, my friends, is with the poor and he is with us if we are with them. This is not a burden, this is an adventure. Don't let anyone tell you it cannot be done. We can be the next generation that ends extreme poverty!"

Cool, huh?

All it takes is a commitment to high quality, universal health care for the poor. All it takes is the rich giving what they have to pay for it. All it takes is big fat drug companies giving their drugs to poor countries for free. They make so much money they can easily do that. All it takes in this country is for the rich and big business to give up just a few of their unnecessary tax breaks and put the money into health insurance for all. They'd hardly even notice -- so what's the big deal? How much money do they need anyway? It's disgusting that they fight ideas like this.