Donald N. Michael’s “Observations Regarding a Missing Elephant”is an interesting--if pessimistic, though generally accurate--picture of the moral blindness caused by the world’s varied views on life, culture and the infliction of pain on others by humanity.

It is perfectly true that, like blind men touching an elephant here and there, we can’t agree on our invisible elephant’s appearance. Each has a part of the truth. Each is right, and all are wrong, because they have not added up their personal deductions to come up with a working theory for putting panetics into practice that might even turn out to be the truth. If it does not, as Prof. Michael observes, we must, like good scientists, be able to put away the false theorem for the more realistic version of what may be the truth.

I agree, we must have hope, but we must also be rational and seek to find common denominators, otherwise we will not be able to solve the problems leading to many dukkhas of unnecessary suffering in our world.

Blindness is relative, however, at least where morality is concerned. It is perfectly proper to beat a wife or child to death according to some cultures and, in others, to hang a five year old child or cut off his hand for stealing a penny for a loaf of bread. Many a child was executed, even in Boston, for such crimes, as late as the 19th century. But, Clarence Darrow told us, such extreme punishments did not reduee the crimes they punished. The day a public hanging took place was a field day for pickpockets prowling through the bloodthirsty crowd who were enjoying the agonized antics of the dying felon.

Michael is wrong in assuming that we cannot come to a world-wide consensus about one 'invisible elephant' in human society. We, humanity in general, are not totally blind or lacking in empathy, for we do have the ability to understand some aspects of poverty and hunger, given the opportunity to view or experience it. We do not need to have a Ph.D. in linguistics to perceive the pangs another is enduring. In a nursery, one baby's wails will cause all the other babies to begin wailing in sympathy. Even if they cannot see what is the matter with the first baby, the others know that something is wrong with their environment, and they cry for help in the only way they know how.

One day without meals will teach anyone how it feels to go hungry. Two days without food will revise any teenager's views on theft as a moral issue as they raid the family refrigerator and guiltily eat the pie intended for tomorrow's dessert. One trip into a slum will show most people (there are some people who seem incapable of empathy!) the horrors of poverty and its possible impact on society. During a depression, one day walking up and down the streets looking for a job to suit their nonexistent skills will teach a teenager the difficulties of transcending want and ignorance without specific schooling or financial backing. Without money to obtain training, only a few very lucky people can manage to better themselves. For the one who manages to drag himself up by the boot straps, hundreds are left in the ghetto of want and ignorance.

Hunger is an 'invisible elephant' that transcends all races, all creeds, all cultures. As Michaels says, it has many causes, war, disease, drought, floods, cataclysmic volcanic events, but in the United States, it is more likely to be caused by economic inequality. But whatever its cause, hunger, world-wide, remains a major common denominator.

Thus, it might be called a glimmer of sight in the blindness that Michael insists is common to all mankind. With that glimmer, we can start to make even more enlightening changes. Where to begin? Obviously, we look for a cause. Is it because of a depressed economy? Is it because schooling is too expensive for the poor to obtain? Is it because the poor are too lazy to work and would rather steal and beg than work? An empty belly will usually urge anyone to find a job, which will feed them.

In a rich economy, one would think everyone would be able to find a job, be able to buy food, instead of resorting to crime to get what they need. If we get rid of the criminals, will that get rid of the hunger pangs of poverty? Which should we try to cure first? Crime, whether caused by nature, nurture or circumstance, or poverty? Poverty seems to be the right place to begin, since we do have statistical observations of a relationship between the crime rate and the distribution of wealth.

So if we cure poverty, will we cure crime? Extended periods of economic distress are usually accompanied by a rising crime rate. Those of us who are interested in making the world a better place, because WE have passed through it, can use these statistics as the starting point of our campaign when proceeding to do battle against poverty and the rise in violent crime, which seems to accompanies it.

Hunger is defmitely a world wide gauge of poverty. Not only does it cross all lines, all boundaries, all races, all creeds, it leads to a wide spectrum of other ills, including deadly diseases. On an individual scale, it may trigger the most honest man to an act of violence, if necessary, to appease it.

Hunger on a broad scale, involving many of the populace, can lead to assassinations, mob rule, group revolts, or even the overturn of a government. We know this is so, for there are many accounts of this in history. Hunger caused revolts in Rome when the public granaries could not supply the Plebians with grain for bread. Hunger had much to do with the French Revolution, as well as the Russian Revolution in 1917. The French peasantry were not only hungry, they were also angry that France was giving money and supplies to foment the American Revolution and aid the American Revolutionists, instead of feeding their own starving peasantry. A well fed peasantry seldom revolts against the upper class. In fact, in the middle 1800s, when one of the Tsars freed the Russian peasants, they revolted against their penniless independence and forced him to return them to their previous status. As serfs, they had certain rights to food and care, which supplied them with lifelong security. But hunger supplied a major motive for the overthrow of the Russian Imperial family at the end of WWI. Had the peasants been well fed, warmly housed and secure, perhaps the Tsar and Tsarina might be reigning over the Russia of today.

The pain of hunger is the one solid fact with which we can actually begin to describe Mankind's 'invisible elephant', for we will then all have our hands on the same part of its trunk or tail and make honest assumptions about its appearance. Obviously, in a rich country, the hungry are not sharing enough of the common wealth, or they wouldn't be hungry. An empty belly leads to all kinds of desperate aetions and despairing envy of those who have what the poor have not.

Our next task then, would be to examine the statistics concerning employment and wages to discover why so many are poor and hungry at least in our own part of the globe. (It is always wisest to clean our own house first. Then we have an example to show others when we tell them how to clean theirs.) The United States is a wealthy nation, yet many people are poor.

The next fact to explore is why one man owns almost one third more of the national income that all the other citizens put together. (There are other wealthy men, too, so most of the nation's wealth is concentrated in a very small percentage of the nation's populace.) Isn't it indecent that one man should have billions while others have nothing? Isn't it indecent that veterans who have served their country are homeless as well as hungry? Wouldn't it be better to put a cap on the salaries of the chief executive officers, in order that a larger middle class might be formed and the poverty level reduced? The more wealth concentrated at the top and the more many of the middle class are forced down the economic ladder into the poverty level.(2)

What shall we do about it? Raise the minimum wage? What good is that if we don't put a cap on the salaries of the rich? In order to keep their dividends, the wealthy companies will merely raise the price of goods in the market to make up the difference in their dividends. That this is so, can be postulated from the Wall Street Journal's3. discussion of inflation. The CPI [Consumer Price Index], notes that although inflation has averaged "only" 3.91 percent annually for the past 30 years(4), it has caused an 85 percent drop in the value of a dollar in those approximately 30 years (5).

One hundred dollars will only buy what used to cost $14.69. It takes $355 to buy what cost $100 only 30 years ago. Yes, the minimum wage has risen, but it has given only temporary relief until the corporations have re-priced their goods. Without caps on the salaries of the CEO's, a rise in the hourly wage rate does nothing to cause a genuine ‘trickle down' from the coffers of the rich. Whenever an increase in the hourly wage is made, the rich should be also be taxed [in addition to the graduated taxes already imposed], using the inflation rate as the taxation rate imposed on the incomes of those earning a personal income of over, let us say, $5,000,000.00 dollars a year. (Personally, I think a million dollars is enough for anyone, but l am willing to be generous.) This might help the corporations and other large businesses to avoid the temptation of taking back the minimum wage increase from their workers by raising the prices of their products. Such a scheme would help to equalize the difference between the rich and poor. No one firm or man should own a third of the country's total income, or even 10 percent of it. It is not acceptable that the salary of the average Chief Executive officer today should be 400 times greater than the pay his workers receive, a gap which Kimberley Blanton of the Boston Sunday Globe staff, asserts is "a tenfold increase in the worker pay gap since 1960, according to United For A Fair Economy, a Cambridge group that advocates income equality."(7).

Having done our best to even out incomes, we could then examine the statistical reasons for criminal activity generally and try to sort them out further. In the sense that nature is not always fair to an individual, giving higher or lowers IQ's in what seems to be a random order, favorable or unfavorable genetic backgrounds, and families too ignorant to nurture their offspring properly, crimes not committed from poverty can then be better assessed. Obviously criminals who insist on courting death in the gas chamber, by electrocution, at the hands of a firing squad, on a gallows or a chopping block cannot really be normal people. Either their circumstances have been so sad, so bad, they have 'gone off the deep end', their training has been inadequate, or they carry defective genes.

If circumstance is the cause of 'deep end' behavior, could it have been mitigated? Is there any way we could arrange that circumstances leading to disaster don't occur again? If poor nurture, including insufficient education, is a major cause of crime, wouldn't it be cheaper and less painful (to our pocketbooks!) if the money we spend on housing a felon was spent in the kind of schooling that would prevent felonious results? As for 'bad genes', a universal healthcare system might be able to locate such biological 'time bombs' in order to defuse them before they went off.

(2) Boston Sunday Globe, February 6, 2000, p. A30. (3) AlM Charter Fund, and Investors Guide for People Seeking Growth and Income, an AIM advertisng publication, February 2000 A.D., p. 3. (4) ibid. (5) Boston Sunday Globe, p. A30. (6) ibid. (7) ibid.