c. 1996 Religion News Service

(Dale Hanson Bourke is the author of”Turn Toward the Wind”and publisher of Religion News Service.)

(UNDATED) The two stories ran 13 pages apart in the Sunday New York Times.

The first, just four pages into the first section, told the heartbreaking story of men and women who live in steel cages stacked atop one another in a grimy section of Hong Kong. They are incarcerated by poverty, and the cages are what they call home.

In the same section, below a photo of a woman who is laughing while a man runs his fingers through her hair, was the story of another trend: the $500 hairdo. According to the story, paying this much has”become a must for chic young Upper East Siders and well-heeled Connecticut matrons.” I finished reading the second story and was about to turn the page, when I stopped cold. A few pages of newsprint separated the two stories, but an immeasurable chasm separated the people.

I found myself between the extremes, left to make sense of the coexistence of abject poverty and wretched excess.

Of course, this was hardly the first time I had been confronted by this dichotomy. But what struck me was how I had become used to it.

In the first story, people lived like animals in one of the wealthiest cities in the world. In the second story, another society had devised yet another way for its richest citizens to part with some of their seemingly limitless dollars.

It’s not that one group of people is bad and another good. The women with $500 hairdos may well be wearing them to charity balls where they contribute a great deal more to worthy causes. The poor citizens of Hong Kong may steal from one another and prey on the weaknesses of their neighbors.

But I still must look at both and make some sense of it all, and I can no longer avoid doing so by saying I am ignorant of the problems of this planet. I have personally seen great wealth and brutal poverty.

Moreover, the Internet now delivers information about the world and its problems easily and instantly, from all parts of the globe. One recent morning, for example, I cyberchatted with a friend in Bosnia and another in Seattle. Air travel makes it possible to be within range of almost anywhere within a day.

We are so close and yet so much more divided.

We can easily know about wars in far off places such as Liberia and Chechnya. We can see pictures of poverty in India and Guatemala. And we can turn our backs as easily as we turn the pages of a newspaper.

Information, it seems, is not enough to motivate people to action. In fact, the more we know, the more inoculated we seem to become to problems.

What moves any of us to action comes from our hearts, not our heads. It is a basic belief system that says such great inequities among people cannot be right. It is an understanding that says it’s absurd and repulsive to read about $500 hairdos and, moments later, about people who could survive on that amount for six months.

Most of all, it is a willingness to feel uncomfortable with such inequity.

Every major religion calls us to action on behalf of the poor and oppressed. Each decries the soul-hardening aspects of wealth and obsessive consumption.

Still, most of us sit in the middle, giving a token amount to the poor while continuing to consume with great delight and occasional guilt. It is an uncomfortable spot, but not so uncomfortable that we are moved to take further action.

There are no easy answers to solving the problems of the world. But I know that the inequities will get worse if people like me look at them and feel nothing.

And so, I said a simple prayer for the women with $500 hairdos and the people who live in cages. I prayed that I would never feel comfortable living in a world that so easily accommodates both.

MJP END BOURKE