Silence Can Kill: Speaking Up to End Hunger and Make Our Economy Work for Everyone - Book - Page 9
Preface: A Lens of Hope
While I was working on the initial draft of this book, public frustration and
anger erupted in the 2016 presidential contests, unleashing a flood of protest
and producing an outcome that revealed how close we have come to letting
our great democratic experiment lose its way.
That outburst serves as a canary in our political mine. To continue on
the present course of growing inequalities and partisan division would be
folly. As the wiser pundits from across the political spectrum have been urging, we need a vision that instills hope and unites us. That is exactly what
this book proposes.
The first half (Parts I and II) sees ending hunger in America as a moral
imperative—but not a stand-alone goal. Hunger thrives on the racial, social,
and economic extremes that are eating away at the soul of our nation and
pulling us apart. But ending hunger could now become the cause that brings
us together across partisan lines to make our economy include everyone
and work for everybody. Because the goal of ending hunger is so decent and
clearly within reach, the pursuit of it in the United States would enable us to
see more clearly the connections between hunger and those deeper problems
that underlie our discontent—which is the focus of the book’s second half
(Parts III and IV). Put simply, in a handful of years we could “repeal” hunger
and begin to replace it with a more inclusive economy. That is a promising
alternative to our current political dysfunctions.
We also have at our fingertips the ability to exert stronger leadership in
helping to end extreme hunger and poverty throughout the world.
Obstacles stand in the way. The first obstacle is doubt that hunger can
be nearly eliminated. Chapter 2 makes the case for doing so in the United
States, where the price we pay for letting hunger persist far outweighs the
cost of erasing it. Chapter 3 contends that ending most extreme hunger and
poverty worldwide by the year 2030—as the nations of the world have pledged
to do—is a daunting but not an impossible goal.
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