Guilty

Dear You,

I'm a news junkie, so I cannot dodge the Economic Bad News. Each day, NPR and the St. Petersburg newspaper remove the layers of my otherwise insulated life. Increasingly, I am led to care about the plight of the world's poor.

It's not that I do much about it. I cannot dodge my responsibity here - being an American means being part of the problem. And hasn't everyone heard that it's good for one's peace of mind to stop watching the six o'clock news? A head-in-the-sand approach, though, cannot make anyone's life better.

A statistic: the 500 richest people in the world a few years ago earned more than the 416 million poorest people (United Nations report). A story: A woman in Haiti once sold shoes on the street, but falling demand has meant that she used all her income to buy food for her child and none to replace her inventory . . . and now she has nothing but an emaciated, dying child (Nicholas Kristoff).

I ingest the daily news of bank bailouts and million dollar bonuses for those who will never be hungry, and I pause on Sundays to pray for the poor. And I hope the leaders of the world are listening, too.