WHY WE ARE POOR

Every day we hear people cry out desperately: I steal because I have nothing to eat. I kill because I am threatened. I give up because there is no hope. I have stopped loving because there is no one to love. I cannot endure because there is much pain. I have stopped praying because there is no God.

We are all part of that vicious cycle we call poverty, that cycle we claim we cannot break. We say that to conquer poverty we have to give people more jobs, improve the delivery of social services, rid society of its biases against the less fortunate. We say that to encourage honesty in public servants, their wages should be raised. The hunger of the spirit cannot be fed by bread alone.

Being poor in body is not an excuse for us to be poor in spirit. Hunger is not a license for us to become less vigilant and less faithful to HIM. Hunger should never be a reason for us to kill, to hate, to stop believing.
We have never seen so much progress before yet people cry out because of war, of tragedy, of injustice. We have so many sophisticated weapon yet people die of hunger and of cruelty. We have the latest medicines available, yet aids continue to terrorize us. We have computers yet errors continue to be committed. We have the best recreational facilities, yet our children turn to drugs. We have vast resources, yet we remain poor. It will take more than all the help other countries are willing to extend to our economy, and more than all the human kindness and strength we can muster, to conquer our burdens.
We seem to have gotten nowhere. Teachers do not teach if they don't get paid on time; nurses leave for foreign countries to earn more money; doctors choose their patients because of money; soldiers rebel against their own flag because of money; children do not study if they are not promised money; parents offer bribes to make sure their children recieve awards; public officials squander money, forgetting they are elected; people kill because of money, and people get killed, because no one helps. The importance people put money has skyrocketed and made us forget the nobility and essence of public services, or brotherhood, of faith, of the existence of God Himself. We forget this is temporary world.

That is why we are poor, and cannot escape the vicious cycle.