Moral Obligation.

Column I wrote really late at night for the paper:

Before you read this, before you even consider going through the words that lie within the rest of this column, I need you to do me a favor.

I need you to step outside yourself for a second; I need you to look outside of your world and not think about your socioeconomic standing, your gender, your race, your roots, where you come from and where you are going. I need you to be completely open-minded and unbiased, if only for the time that it takes you to read what I have to say.

Now stop. Stop what you are doing. Count to three. One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi. Are you counting? Good.

In those three seconds, approximately 63 children died worldwide. Sixty-three children, younger than the age of 5. Dead. Sixty-three children who should be learning to color in the lines, 63 children who should be drifting off to sleep to the sound of a soothing lullaby, 63 children who should be dreaming of becoming astronauts and doctors dead in three seconds.

Math buffs have already calculated it in their heads; that’s about 21 children dying per second. And they are dying not because of an axe murderer, a natural disaster, or an alien abduction. They are dying because of poverty.

That's 21 children dying every second of every hour of every day because they do not have water, or food, or clothes, or shelter. Twenty-one children dying every second of every hour of every day because no one is there to help them.

You don't have to get out the calculator. I won't keep you waiting. That's 30,000 children dying every day. That's 912,500 children dying every month. That's, brace yourself, nearly 11 million children dying every year.

Every year, almost 11 million children die for no reason other than the fact that no one is listening when their stomachs grumble in pain, when their throats go dry from thirst; because no one is watching when their stomachs turn outward with malnutrition and their skin begins to cling to bone.

Has it hit you yet? Have I shocked you into caring or are those statistics not enough? Twenty-one children die in every second. That's one classroom in this school falling dead with every tick of a mechanical clock. Tick. Mr. Green's first-hour English class? Gone. Tick. Ms. Hall's fourth-hour psychology? Nonexistent.

Use your imagination. Overcompensate and be obnoxiously imaginative, if not for yourself, then for the children who never got the chance to use theirs.

Poverty is real. I t is frighteningly real, and all too often we get caught up in our own problems, losing perspective of the world and the things that truly matter. But I know what you’re thinking; there’s only so much we can do. We’re all just students at a high school in West Michigan. We don’t have money to donate or time to give.

Luckily, it doesn’t take time or money to make a difference. All it takes is a change in perspective, a change in mind, a change in heart.

By reading this column and educating yourself, you are making a difference. By spreading awareness and telling others about the hard truth, you are impacting the world. It may seem insignificant, but it all adds up in the end. Life is a butterfly effect, and that is something we need to take advantage of.

The atrocities of poverty are no secret. They are displayed all around us—on TV, in books, on walls of graffiti and on the Internet. But all our lives, poverty has been in our lives, something that is terrible and real, but something that we could seemingly do nothing about.

Eleven million children die yearly. That’s an unthinkably large number, and it makes the task of ending, or even making a dent in poverty, seem unfeasible. But rethink everything you’ve known. Rethink all of the premonitions you may have had about poverty.

The 25 richest people in the world have a combined wealth greater than $466 billion. The combined income of the poorest half of humanity, that’s over three billion people, is less than that. Twenty-five human beings earn more than half of the world’s population combined.

And those same people are the ones who run wealthy nations and multinational corporations that influence so much global revenue that goes in and out of poor countries. So why aren’t those people, who hold so much influence over the world’s population, doing something?

Well, those billionaires have that much money for a reason. They run giant corporations that are on the fast track to globalization, extending their companies and manufacturers to every corner of the planet, including impoverished nations around the world.

But unlike one would expect, those jobs and “opportunities” that they bring to less-developed nations don’t help at all.

Because there are so many impoverished nations around the world, they all have to compete to catch a giant corporation’s attention and a potential investment. In order to do this, nations have to lower standards, lower wages, and nearly remove all working regulations that might have existed for their citizens.

The few resources lesser-developed nations might have are exploited, and wealthy nations ask for lower and lower prices, knowing that the global competition and desperation of these nations will allow them to get what they ask.

It is a vicious cycle that leads to a lower quality of living for citizens, a dependency on wealthy and capitalist nations and finally, social unrest and government fragmentation that has led to the global economic financial crisis that we have on our hands today.

So although those 25 people might have the world, quite literally, at their fingertips, they will not be doing much to help it. It is up to you, to me, to us.

We have to change our minds, educate those around us, and become passionate about issues that matter. To change the world, we must first change ourselves.

We have been raised within a gluttonous society that focuses on independence and self-reliability, so change is not going to occur in a day, in a month, or even in a year. It is something we have to work at, but there’s no better time to start than now. After all, every second you wait is the death of 21 children.

I am not asking for your money or your time. I am asking for your consideration of what is happening around the world. I am asking for you to put yourself in the place of the billions around the world who have no home, no food, no hope.

By living in the United States, we automatically have leverage. We, as consumers, control the corporations that are exploiting the nations where these children are dying. If we become educated and respond to this global atrocity, they will have no choice but to change.

So change your mind, change your lifestyle and refuse to purchase products from those global powers that don’t care. Become educated because you are the future and your decisions determine how it will pass.

And please, do it now. In the time it took you to read this article, approximately 6,300 children died.

Time isn’t money. Time is life. Time is hope. Time is the future of humanity. How will you spend yours?