American Buddhist Net

4/11/2008 12:45 AM

Dirt Cookies

I’m going to go out on a limb here, and make a dire prediction, food is the next oil.

I say that because there has been a little reported news story the last few days concerning rioting in Haiti over the soaring cost of one of two essential consumables man cannot live without: food. (The other of course being water).

Simple food. More precisely, not so much the lack of it, although that very well could be next, given the current trend in environmental degradation, but the price of food.

Food Riots. What a Headline. It almost sounds like some ominous reality that’s used for gravity in a surreal futuristic Fascist world were Riot Squads fight starving hoards in a Science Fiction flick. Oh, yeah.

Seriously though, the soaring price of oil, and the subsequent increase of everything else as a result, the days of cheap food are over.

Another casualty of the Bush Crime Family era of the “ownership society,” in which all the money of the Middle Class was purposely funneled into the coffers of Big Business.

Couple that with the absurd idea of using food as fuel, so called “bio-fuel,” Big Business has found a way to make sure we spend all of our money on the very thing we cannot decide to skip this month.

To sum up Haiti’s situation, the Island Nation cannot generate enough food on its own, so it must import food. Importing means transportation, and transportation means fuel. More money for fuel means more money for food.

Allowing one Industry to hog all the money to the detriment of all other industries is the very definition of Capitalism out of control. Especially when people start starving to death.

Laughably, Haitian President Rene Preval, went on TV and asked people to stop rioting. Why should they? If there were ever a reason to have a riot, it may very well be because if you don’t make some noise about starving to death, then you just lay down and, well, starve to death.

The whole situation is punctuated by a really depressing part of the Haiti story: People are making cookies out of dirt. That’s right, a pinch of salt, a little vegetable oil, and a whole lot of dirt. One Haitian man claimed he ate 25 dirt cookies a day. One woman ate dirt cookies for so long, she became ill, was rushed to a hospital were surgery was performed, where Doctors discovered a mound of dirt in her stomach.

This is all they can afford. Dirt cookies.

Shouldn’t we all be embarrassed about starving people eating dirt? Maybe someone should speak up.

Haiti is only the beginning. Soon, there will be dirt cookies for all… at least until Exxon figures out how to charge us for the dirt as well.