Silence Can Kill: Speaking Up to End Hunger and Make Our Economy Work for Everyone - Book - Page 7
Foreword
visit lands facing more extreme versions of the same challenges confronting
the United States, and you can see what happens if the trajectory of our problems is not changed. By viewing your own country from afar, you also learn
about it in ways you never could back home. You see both the consequences
of inaction (or wrong action) and the impact of governance—good and bad.
You return home with a fire in your belly to make a difference. Art Simon
has dedicated his life to tending (and stoking) such fires.
Assuming we want to end hunger, we need to recognize the relative
value of charity versus government policy. Charity is important. But reading Silence Can Kill makes it clear—in the same way Art introduced me to
these concepts in Bread for the World forty years ago—that all the charity in
America combined has only a small fraction of the impact on our nation’s
poor and hungry that government policy has. It’s great to have a photo on
your mantel of a single child you helped feed, but it is much more important
to help shape a world in which parents can work hard and provide for their
own children.
While the wisdom of Silence Can Kill resonates with people of any faith,
as a Christian I appreciated the reminder that if you want an effective,
Christ-like approach to hunger, it’s not only OK to get political—you must
get political. This book explains how silence is violence. Hunger and poverty
are real in our country. And ignoring them is violence in slow motion.
Political discourse in America is a harsh mirror—it reflects what people really care about. And in our democracy today, most politicians figure
there’s not much interest in talking about hunger. This can change, but not
without an awakening.
Capitalism—the free-market system—is like a religion in America. As
a business owner, I’m thankful for the freewheeling environment in which
I get to run my company. I can employ people well, produce good stuff at a
good price, and make plenty of money. But I also know that in an unbridled
free market, buying power rules. If my cat has more buying power than
your child, my cat gets the tuna. These days in our country, there are a lot of
fat cats. There are more homeless people . . . and more people with second
homes. There are more people in prison . . . and more people living in gated
communities. There are a lot of good people who are afraid . . . and, because
of that fear, more Americans are aspiring to build not bridges but walls.
Art Simon teaches us that, for our ship of state, the free market is the
engine—and it’s a powerful engine. But it’s not the steering wheel. Our society’s steering wheel is our government (the collective “we”). The engine
is morally neutral—it could be selling apples or sex, cars or cocaine. And
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