Rich

A thought popped in my head the other day when I started getting excited about the Invisible Children Legacy Tour. We have it made out here in USA. We don’t have to wake up in fear of armies coming to our cities and killing or kidnapping us, we don’t have to worry about hurting our feet due to the lack of shoes, and we obviously aren’t worrying about being unable to access what’s going on around the world (internet, television, etc.) I know that the biggest worry for me is choosing which v-neck I want to wear with my shoes. I have it made and I am so fortunate.

I was stuck on the freeway and I started noticing all these billboards that try to sell products to people. There was this one advertisement that got me to thinking, thinking, and thinking some more. It read “Lap Band” with the image of an overweight person’s foot on a scale. Sure, some people are more fortunate than others with good metabolism, but we are one selfish country. 67 percent of America is overweight, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. There are an estimated 307 million people in America according to the World Factbook, which means 206 million Americans are overweight. According to Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Americans spend $40 billion a year on weight loss programs and products. If a majority of these overweight people paid for these programs that would be $380 a year spent on these diets by one person. That upset me, there are third world countries out there that barely survive off of a dollar a day and here in America the average person spends up to $140 a day. In Timor-Leste, a third-world In South-East Asia the average family must survive on 400 dollars a year. I just can’t imagine what the pot-bellied starving children would think when they would see these advertisements for diets and surgeries for weight-loss. They would be confused and would wonder where all this food came from and how ridiculously lucky we are to be able to stock up groceries for a full month on half a paycheck or even less.

We are so spoiled and we don’t even know it. Some people have a pair of shoes for each outfit and some of those pairs don’t get worn more than five times. Some families in poor countries have only one pair of shoes for the children to share, some children even have to miss out on education because schools require students to wear shoes. In some cases, each child in a family is able to attend school twice a week if they are lucky.

We are blessed with freedom. In Uganda, children hide every night in order to stay hidden from the rebel group and forced to join. Almost 90 percent of the LRA (Lord’s Resistance Army), the most feared rebel group in Uganda, are abducted children that are forced to join or are killed. After being abducted, they terrorize any civilized areas and abduct more children into their army.

We don’t know how great we have it, or we don’t show our appreciation enough. Compared to other places in the world, each and every one of us with a five-dollar bill in our pockets are rich. So start looking at what you have, start appreciating, and realize that you have it better than a majority of the people in the world today.