On caring enough

My brother Arthur and I have been discussing my caring post by e-mail. Essentially, he’s asking how much is enough. Good question. How much can we care about Darfur or AIDS when we have real problems and real lives here? Then this was in this morning’s paper: Few Canadians realize extent of Holocaust:

“One can ask, ‘How can a genocide happen?’ Well, I guess part of the answer is a lot of good people have busy lives and they’re not paying attention,” Mr. Winn said. Foreign Affairs Minister Pierre Pettigrew is to make much the same point in an address to a special Holocaust commemorative session of the General Assembly of the United Nations tonight. “It is our ability to recognize evil, to battle our own indifference in the face of hatred against others, that requires the greatest courage and greatest insight. Sad to say, as a civilization we continue to fail on both counts,” Mr. Pettigrew says. “Since the liberation of Auschwitz, the world has witnessed much brutality against our fellow human beings: Cambodia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Rwanda, Darfur, and the list of those damned by indifference goes on.”

With 350,000 or more who could die in Darfur in the next few months, it’s getting harder to do nothing. A lot of people have been linking to Ron Sider’s article:

American Christians live in the richest nation on earth and enjoy an average household income of $42,409. The World Bank reports that 1.2 billion of the world’s poorest people try to survive on just one dollar a day. At least one billion people have never heard the gospel. The Ronsvalles point out that if American Christians just tithed, they would have another $143 billion available to empower the poor and spread the gospel. Studies by the United Nations suggest that just an additional $70