It takes great courage to open one's heart and mind to the tremendous injustice and suffering in our world.

Recent evidence confirms that retail prices of essential consumer goods in poor countries are not appreciably lower than in the United States or Western Europe. In fact, with deregulation and "free trade", the cost of living in many Third World cities is now higher than in the United States. My experience in Latin America and Haiti is that the prices of meat, fish and fresh vegetables are about the same as in the United States. Can you imagine eating on less than one dollar a day?

It is painfully easy to define human beings. They are beings who, for no good reason at all, create their own unnecessary suffering.

The fact that the United States has political, economic, and legal structures that do indeed create incentives to control hazards (in the workplace) is one the reasons the corporations have moved to Latin America and Asia.

It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.

Doesn't it seem that it is always by chance that these things happen, or is it because of the generosity of a shared knowledge of suffering that allows for it?