Children of Nunavut

This article contains facts that may be shocking and cause FEAR or ANXIETY.

IF YOU ARE A FEARFUL OR WORRISOME PERSON DO NOT READ FURTHER.

You may say that this article has nothing to do with Spirituality. Let me tell you a story. I used to be the supervisor of a children’s home in Mexico. We had 120 unwanted children under our roof. One day we had a staff meeting whose purpose was to iron out practical problems facing our operations – providing food, education, health care and such things for the kids. The meeting went very well and we all knew we had been successful in meeting our challenges. At the meeting was a caring Christian woman who worked as a volunteer secretary in the administrative offices across the river, in the U.S. I had never once seen her at the children’s home. And as the meeting wound to a close she blurted out, tears in her eyes expressing the depth of her sincere feelings, “But what about their souls?” And I could not help but think of Benjamin Franklin’s old proverb, “It is hard for an empty sack to stand upright.”

Our spiritual life is inextricably bound to our physical life. The physical body is the vehicle of spirit. This is the reason that such practices as Hatha Yoga came into being and are such effective disciplines for spiritual growth.

From http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-18413043 comes the following item:

"The Nunavut Inuit Child Health Survey conducted in 2007-2008 found that nearly 70% of Inuit children aged three to five years in 16 Nunavut communities resided in food-insecure households, meaning they did not have sufficient access to appropriate foods for a nutritious diet.
Overall, 31% of Inuit children lived in homes with moderate child food insecurity; many were fed less expensive food or did not eat enough because there was no money for food. Another 25.1% lived in homes with severe child food insecurity; many skipped meals, went hungry, or did not eat for a whole day.
The UN's Special Rapporteur on the right to food, Olivier De Schutter, recently travelled to Canada, where he said 2-3m people couldn't afford the diets they needed to lead healthy lives. He said one million First Nations people and 55,000 Inuit were in a "desperate situation"."

A cabbage in the Nunavut town of Iqaluit, the territorial capital of Nunavut, can cost US$27 (C$13.59/kg). A gallon of milk can set your household budget back over US$15. But never fear, the minimum wage in northern Canada is an unheard of $11 an hour. I wouldn’t mind working for over an hour to earn a kilogram of cabbage, or an hour and twenty minutes for a gallon of milk.

If this were just an isolated circumstance it might be unsettling. But it is not an isolated circumstance. It is symptomatic of the direction in which the world is moving, a harbinger of a future that will be shared by all humans to a greater or lesser degree much sooner than you think (if you think about such things at all.)

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and the World Food Programme (WFP), in "The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2011" (SOFI), an annual flagship report which they jointly produced this year, inform us that about 1.2 billion people around the world “face food insecurity,” a euphemism for “go hungry.” The reason that so many people live on an insufficient diet is not lack of food, but the high cost of food. Just why is food so expensive? I can grow a few tomato plants and with the tomatoes they produce feed my family all the fresh tomatoes they can eat during the summer, dry or can tomatoes for winter, and give tomatoes to my friends and neighbors so that they will love me. Cost? Some water and a little cow manure.

The reason food is so expensive, and daily growing ever more expensive, is our socioeconomic system. The means of production and distribution are ever more centralized. We are living in a corporate world. And corporations are, in their very nature, psychopathic. We live in a psychopathic world. According to the FAO, “High food prices have also provided incentives for increased investments by corporate investors (including cross-border public and private entities) in all parts of the agricultural value chain.” This translates to “Corporations are invading and dominating food production and distribution systems world-wide.” The end result will be total control of all food and other vital resources by monstrous corporations; the world will be enslaved by the wealthy few, just as occurred in Pharaonic Egypt in the times of Joseph (read Genesis, chapter 41, for that story.)

The much-vilified (and with good reason) Monsanto Corporation is an example. Monsanto develops genetically-modified food plants, wins the legal right to patent life, markets a complete package (herbicide resistant plants together with the herbicide – and seeds incapable of reproducing themselves) and then ruthlessly persecutes any farmer who attempts to remain free of their monopoly. The recent attempt to privatize the public water supply in Cochabamba, Bolivia is another example, sinister in its implications. Corporations exist for one purpose only, and that is profit. And it is this characteristic that makes corporations behave in exactly the same way that the psychopathic personality does. And this means that, as the dominion over the world’s basic resources by the corporations grows, the entire world becomes fundamentally psychopathic. And the children of Nunavut are nothing but numbers of no importance. Human suffering and the rape of our planet are of no consequence in corporate ledgers.

I am reading Los Señores del Narco, by the investigative journalist Anabel Hernandez. The results of her investigation make it abundantly clear that the drug trade is controlled not by the drug lords, but by the politicians who rule the country (in this case Mexico.) What is even more appalling is that the politicians – at the very peak of the power structure – in Mexico are controlled by...guess who. It is documented fact that aircraft of the United States Air Force have landed in Mexico to take on cargos of drugs bound for the U.S. The CIA was, and probably still is, actively involved in promoting the drug traffic. The obscure town of Mena, Arkansas was one of the primary receiving points for drug shipments from Mexico while Bill Clinton was governor of that state. Perhaps that was just an unpleasant coincidence.

While driving cab in Fort Worth, Texas I picked up a career diplomat. He had been ambassador to three Latin American countries (Grenada, Colombia and Chile) and clearly was in the highest diplomatic echelon. I proposed to him, in the course of our conversation, that all drugs should be made legal. He said that he agreed, but that such a change in public policy was “not politically possible.” I am ignorant of the workings of politics, and never quite understood what that term means in real life. After reading this book I understand what he meant. The meaning is that as long as such vast amounts of money are flowing into the pockets of the rich and powerful, nothing will change. Change is “not politically possible” when the rulers are becoming obscenely wealthy with things as they are. And this applies not only to the drug trade, but to food and water and every other aspect of life.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is our present and future reality. It is not going to change. The question for the person who is “spiritually inclined” is “How do I survive and grow in such a world as this?” If one wishes to “succeed in the world” there is really little choice. One must participate in and support the psychopathic system. This means that one must become psychopathic, in act if not in fact. But it is our actions that define who we really are. I suppose it is up to you to answer the question.