opinion

Open any newspaper, watch any TV station, and you will be drowned in the appeals for massive spending on consumer goods that most of us don't really need. Religious holidays turned into orgies of consumption at Christmas and Chanukah completely undermine the message of the deep message of these religions that we have an obligation to relieve the suffering of the poor and the powerless. What an irony that the West has taken the beautiful symbol of hope rebron embodied in the portrayal of baby Jesus who comes to the world to challenge the rule of Roman imperialism --- and turned it into an occasion for profligate spending on everything but what is most needed --- an end to global poverty and an end ot the suffering of the world's children! Those of us who are rooted in a spiritual sensibility must lift our voices together to challenge the way that this season has become an adjunct to capitalism at its worst.

The complicating factor is this: there is something very good about celebrating this season as a time of hope, a time of light in darkness, a time for families to be together --- and even a time when people reach out through gifts to show a certain level of caring that normally is not encouraged in our society. Yet all that beautiful instinct gets subverted when it is turned into profligate spending and ignoring the suffering that surrounds us.

It would be very different if at the same moment that we were celebrating and cariing for our immediate friends and neighbors we were also creating a Global Marshall Plan along the lines outlined by The Tikkun Community (five percent of the GNP of the advanced industrial societies should be dedicated for each year of the next 20 years to eliminating global poverty, homelessness, hunger, inadequate health care and inadequate education), and if we were giving gifts to each other that reflected our commitment to healing and transforming the world. But when we think that giving that kind of a gift isn't "a real gift" because we know that our friends are expecting something material and shiny and flashy and consumable, we are giving in to the dynamics that guarantee that our society's wealth will be squandered without sensitivity to the realities of the world in which we live. So it is to encourage that sensitivity, not to destroy our pleasure at this season but to encourage that it be mixed with a renewed commitment to the Tikkun vision and to concrete action for global transformation, that I am passing on to you this information released a few days ago by the United Nations.

More than half the world's children are suffering the effects of poverty, war and HIV/AIDS, denying them a healthy and safe childhood, UNICEF's recent annual report said. The United Nations children's fund report on The State of the World's Children found more than one billion children were growing up hungry and unhealthy, schools had become targets for warring parties and whole villages were being killed off by AIDS.

A failure by governments around the world to live up to standards outlined in 1989's Convention on the Rights of the Child caused permanent damage to children and blocked progress toward human rights and economic advancement, the report said. "Too many governments are making informed, deliberate choices that actually hurt childhood," UNICEF executive director Carol Bellamy said.

In his foreword to the report, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said poverty denied children dignity and endangered their lives, conflict robbed them of a secure family life and HIV/AIDS killed parents, teachers, doctors and children themselves.

Compiled by UNICEF and researchers at the London School of Economics and Bristol University, the report found more than half the children in developing countries lived in poverty without access to basic goods and services.

It also said: One in six children was severely hungry.

One in seven had no access to health care.

One in five had no safe water.

One in three had no toilet or sanitation facilities at home.

The report found 640 million children did not have adequate shelter; 300 million had no access to information such as TV, radio or newspapers and 140 million children, the majority of them girls, had never been to school.

Poverty was not confined to developing countries, the report said, as the proportion of children living in low-income households in 11 of 15 industrialized nations rose in the past decade.

More than 10 million child deaths were recorded in 2003, with an estimated 29,158 children under five dying from mostly preventable causes everyday.

UNICEF reported conflict around the world had seriously injured or permanently disabled millions of children, while millions more endured sexual violence, trauma, hunger and disease caused by wars.

Nearly half of the 3.6 million people killed in conflict during the 1990s were children and around 20 million children were forced from their homes and communities by fighting. UNICEF said almost half a million children under 15 died of AIDS in 2003, while another 630,000 children were infected with HIV. By 2003 some 2.1 million children under 15 were living with HIV/AIDS, most of whom were infected during pregnancy, birth or through breast-feeding. From 2001 to 2003, the number of children who had lost one or both parents to AIDS rose from 11.5 million to 15 million and around 80 percent of those were living in sub-Saharan Africa.

The UNICEF report said the world had the capacity to reduce poverty, conflict and HIV/AIDS and improve the plight of the world's children. It said Millennium Development Goals, which aim to improve the world through human development by 2015 and were agreed to by the UN's 191 member states in 2000, could be achieved at an annual cost of $40-$70 billion. In comparison, world spending on military in 2003 was $956 billion.

It is so hard, living in the false consciousness generated by Western media, to even really take in to our own heads a picture of what is really happening in this world. But the pain and suffering described above is the flip-side of the ads you see every day encouraging all of us to frantically consume more and more and more --- and identifying the good feelings of this holiday season with the degree to which we get and give unnecessary consumer goods.

In this moment, to stay true to the deepest and most beautiful aspects of the Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Islamic and other spiritual traditions is not to denounce these holidays but to transform them. To do that, we should not have a judgmental attitude toward our fellow Americans or Westerners, because the consuming is a reflection of a desire to show caring --- something that is actually quite beautiful in everyone. Rather, we need to expand that circle of caring by helpiing people channel that beautiful part of themselves into social and political programs that would eliminate the suffering, the poverty, the starvation, the deaths of millions of children, the yearly unnoticed economic Holocaust, that is happening at this very moment. It is in a spirit of compassion for ourselves and for each other that we must approach this holiday season and transform it back to its deepest truth: that in the midst of all the darkness, the world can yet be be healed and transformed, that tikkun is possible, that light will yet shine.


Rabbi Michael Lerner is the founder of Tikkun, a San Francisco-based organization dedicated to peace and justice.



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