Greed and Suffering

For the love of money is the root of all evil — 1 Timothy v. 6:10

People have this mistaken idea that money is evil. That’s not true. We need money to live. As someone who has been poor, I understand how hard it can be to not have enough money. Yet I have been lucky — I have never unintentionally missed a meal.

My parents were Indian immigrants to New York City and while they sacrificed many things, they always made sure their children were well nourished with healthy, home-cooked meals. My Dad wore the same coat for 10 years (which Mom lovingly patched for him) but us children were well cared for.

Unfortunately this is not the case with many of the children in this world.

And many adults too.

The culprit is greed.

We could lay the blame on the economic system of capitalism, but the reality is that without free markets and the ability to create wealth, many modern innovations would not be here.

One reason we no longer have smallpox epidemics, for example, is that modern technology has allowed us to create vaccines that have led to its eradication.

There is nothing wrong with innovation, with owning a company and saving for retirement. There is nothing wrong with providing an education for your children, for having a decent home.

However, there is something wrong with greed. There is something wrong with using the power that money gives you to exploit others.

Too often rich Western corporations take advantage of the poverty in poor countries, as the photo above shows. Here you can see young children working in the gold mine near Tiébélé in Burkina Faso, in Africa. Among the 100 workers are 30 children.

According to the United Nations, up to a million children between 5 and 17 years old work in small-scale gold mines in Africa. They earn as little as $2 a day. In some parts of Africa 30–50% of workers are children.

This is obviously child exploitation, but whose fault is it?

It is partially the fault of Western conglomorates, but it is also the fault of African governments who don’t protect their people. Yes, they have labor laws on the books but enforcement is slim. Often corrupt officials accept bribes to look the other way.

The reason, of course, is greed.

While one can also blame the parents for allowing their children to do this kind of work, the reality is that for families living on the edge of poverty, putting their children in school instead of the mines could lead to starvation.

And this is not a problem only in Africa. It is not because somehow Africans are inferior to the rest of us, because they are not. Greed in universal. All of humanity has greedy exploiters who take advantage of the vulnerable.

Case in point — the United States in the 19th and early 20th century.

The picture above shows young children working in the coal mines in West Viriginia. Other children in America worked in factories.

These children often faced dangerous conditions, suffered ill health, and obviously didn’t get an education.

Their parents had no choice — there is an old song by Tennessee Ernie Ford that tells us how the exploitation of the workers by the mine owners kept them perpetually impoverished. Here is a modern version of the song by bass singer Geoff Castellucci.

Note the lines where it says that “a poor man’s made out of muscle and blood, skin and bones, a mind that’s weak and a back that’s strong.”

This is how the mine owners saw their employees. It’s how they justified the exploitation. They treated people like machines, as “meat” to be consumed, not as fellow human beings with minds and souls and the capacity for deep feelings.

The line, “St. Peter don’t you call me ’cause I can’t go, I owe my soul to the company store” is particularly poignant because the mining companies made sure their workers couldn’t leave.

They were often stuck behind fences and they were paid is ‘scrip which they could only use to buy goods in the company store, which set prices so high that miners were perpetually in debt. This eventually led to riots and the government came down on the side of the mining companies, often having protestors shot.

These were suffering people, often malnourished, poorly dressed, uneducated. They were our brothers and sisters that suffered and died — because in Christ (for those of us who believe) we are all part of God’s family and we should treat each other that way.

Yet Christians have often been the worst representative of God’s love, which is the greatest commandment — we are to love God and love each other. Each person represents an image of God and if we say we love God but then treat people like sh*t, that shows what our faith is worth.

Of course, this is not just a Christian problem. As far as I know, all faiths teach love. This includes Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Native American faiths, Wiccans. Even most atheists have a sense of fair play.

Yet world wide, the powerful exploit those without power and seem to see nothing wrong with it.

In India, where my parents are from, the majority population is Hindu. My father often told me that Hindus treat women well because half of the Indian pantheon is female — Saraswati is paired with Brahma, Lakshmi with Vishnu, and Parvati with Shiva.

My relatives, when speaking of a married couple always put the wife’s name first. So it would be, say, Nisha-Siddartha.

Yet child prostitution is endemic in India, as well as many other parts of Southeast Asia including majority Buddhist countries such as Thailand.

According to this article, there are about 1.2 million children working in brothels. A few were just 6 months old!

And this is not the only type of child exploitation in India — many of the children begging on the streets were stolen from their parents and deliberately maimed or blinded in order to make it easier for them to get money.

There are also many child workers.

So why does the Indian government do nothing to solve this problem?

Again, it comes down to human greed.

It’s not just wealthy corporations. It’s also marginally well off madams. It’s the drug dealers, the prison guards. It’s those who clear cut forests.

Because yes, we exploit not just each other, but the innocent land that God gave us as a heritage and the animals we should respect, not abuse. In the Bible, it tells the Israelites that just as they and their servants are to take a day of rest, so too are the animals that work for them.

When we abuse animals, when we desecrate the environment, when we allow the exploitation of the poor — it is all part and parcel of the same evil.

Because it costs more to treat animals humanely rather than lock them up in suffocating barns and tiny pens. It costs more to carefully harvest trees instead of clear cutting. It costs more to pay workers a living wage.

So Walmart workers are often on food stamps while their CEO, Doug McMillon, made $26.9 million.

And American veterans are among the homeless. They fought for us, and how do we treat them?

Indeed, the love of money IS the root of all evil.

It is a universal problem, and it seems overwhelming.

But each of us, in our own little ways, can make a difference.

We can treat the people who serve us with dignity and respect. That means tipping well and not screwing employees. It means doing the best we can to support humane farming methods. It means not expanding our subdivisions so that animals have less and less land to live on and then killing them when they enter the space that used to belong to them.

It means not wasting water by insisting on green lawns in the desert. Or wasting the other resources we have been blessed with. It means donating when we can to food banks, to humane shelters, to educational enrichment programs for disadvantaged children.

If we can’t donate money, we could donate time — maybe an hour a week to tutor a child, walk a shelter dog, help clean a city park or serve a meal to a homeless person.

It means not glorifying narcissists and falling victim to advertisers who feed our hunger for products we don’t need.

This last reminds me of an example of an Indian woman who went to Mother Theresa who asked what she could do. She was told — next time you buy a sari, instead of getting the one you would normally buy, get one a little bit less expensive, and give the difference to the poor.

It reminds me of my mother. Despite not being well off, she and my father donated a small amount every year to pay for a child’s education in India. She also grew a bumper crop of tomatoes every year which fed not just our family but also the neighbors. She gave all of them ripe tomatoes throughout the summer harvest season.

The reality is that the world is full of suffering and people feel hopeless, but there is plenty we can all do.

If enough of us do small things that don’t even cost us very much, we can change our culture to one that is less greedy.

And this is something ALL of us can do — whether we are rich or poor, black or white, religious or atheist, Republican or Democrat. None of that matters. All that matters is that we care and that we treat each other with respect and compassion.

I am fighting stage IV cancer. If you can help with medical bills, I would really appreciate it. Or if you enjoy my writing and would like to buy me a cup of coffee, that’s great too. Maybe someday I can return the favor.

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This post was previously published on Shefali O’Hara’s blog.

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