Americans have no idea how rich we are, but everyone else, certainly does; it's often the first thing foreigners mention about the United States. There is, of course, also extensive poverty within the United States, especially among children, a condition. But most of us take for granted modern bathrooms, hot showers, and unlimited water for cooking at the turn of a faucet; no walking to and from an unclean creek with buckets and building a fire first, as countless women in Africa, Asia, and South America still do every day. Nor do we think twice about jumping in one of our family's two or three cars and zipping off whenever we want, wherever we want; we disdain the buses, trains, and other forms of mass transit widely used even in affluent Japan and western Europe as too slow and inconvenient, and the walking that hundreds of millions of the world's poor rely upon is inconceivable to us; many of us will drive the two blocks to the corner store to pick up bread and milk. And that bread and milk, which are always fresh, only hint at the mind-boggling variety and volume of food and drink we have to choose from, whether in mammoth supermarkets whose shelves bulge with virtually every food imaginable no matter what time of year or where we live-strawberries in February, sea crabs in Denver-or in the restaurants that now receive 46 percent of all the money Americans spend on food per year.
Put another way, Americans don't realize how poor most other people in the world are. For most people on the planet, shopping is an exercise in penny-pinching prudence, not the ~ compulsive hobby it has become for many Americans. Approximately one in every five human beings subsists on one dollar a day, a level of poverty which makes hunger and illness their frequent companions. According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, some 35,600 children die every day from "conditions of starvation"-that is, from the many illnesses that prey upon tiny bodies that go hungry day after day.
Americans are not unaware of world poverty-we're proud of sending food aid overseas-but we have little grasp of how beyond the human norm our own level of consumption is. It doesn't help that our news media have almost no interest in the outside world in general and the plight of the poor in particular; but neither do we get out and see for ourselves. The relatively few Americans who travel overseas generally confine themselves to zones of English-speaking comfort. Thus remain oblivious to our extraordinary privilege.
