Investigating Starvation – How does it feel to Starve?

How does it feel to starve? Have anyone of us ever asked ourselves that question and if not: Why? This article investigates these questions. It investigates the silent and secret resistance that most of us experience when it comes to a subject like starvation – a condition that more than 1 billion people are born into without any possible way of ever getting out. It investigates the problem from different angles and offers a Solution that brings the Perspective back to a Common Sense Re-education of all of us to start Caring for Real and Participate in bringing about Changes that is in Fact Best for All.

So how does it feel to Starve?

Alouette Mayer writes: “What does it feel like to be hungry, really hungry, for many days? And many weeks? And longer. It’s easy to imagine the beginning symptoms like weakness, shakiness, irritability, fatigue. But what happens when those aren’t remedied by food? Is it painful when the organs begin shrinking as they do in starvation? It must be. And as the immune system loses force, how does one endure the cramping, combined with the weakness, combined with the lowering body temperature, combined with the overall bloating as the body retains fluid?”

Can you imagine yourself feeling that terrible? Now expand it to your family. Your daughter. Your tiny son whose tummy is distending and who cries with headaches. Your grandmother, coughing and scared and silent. What would it feel like to watch a toddler, your toddler, weaken and beg for what you can’t give? No running water, no toilets, huddled in refugee camps miles and miles long, And its getting cold. It’s going to get really, really cold and wet heavy snows are coming. And you’re so terribly hungry.

Imagine the stench and disgusting danger of raw sewage, of the infectious diarrhea that comes from that. And there are already dead bodies to be dragged away to be buried or burned by weak hungry men. How does a frail starving man dig a grave for his neighbor, his friend, or his tiny son? The nights must be endless, filled with prayers for a warm morning sun.”

All that Matters is food

That is unfathomable – except if you are one of those 1 billion people that actually are literally starving to death or one of the 2 billion living in extreme poverty. What I find when I look at it for myself is the word “desperation” – not even a single thought creeps into my mind because all I can think about is food. Maybe I don’t even know how much food actually exists in this world and believe that everyone lives the way I do, or I have seen food at the market, luxuriously prohibited and out of my reach. Maybe my village had food once, but a drought caused the animals and crops to die, so now we have no food. Or maybe I lost my parents to malaria and now have to live on the street begging for scraps and rotten food. Whatever the case: I am hungry.

All I know is that I am hungry. If I am able to, I drink water to fill the stomach and get some feeling of being full. I feel tired and drained, but I have to keep going and I look desperately everywhere for any sign of food anywhere. I look at the dogs running around and when we had a goat, it was difficult not to kill it, but we needed the milk more than we needed the meat. I keep looking for a way out, but there is no way out, so all I can do is survive.

In a documentary from Nigeria a woman talked about how it would be like to live in a Western country.  What she said was: “that would be nice because then I would not want to die”. Another documentary about North Korea, two men in their twenties, who had escaped the regime and was living in Soul, said that even though they had lived there for over two years, still all they thought about was food. For those of us who have been used to plentiful and endless access to food, it is unimaginable to conceive how it must be like to live your entire life, only thinking about food.

The Good Intentions of The West

In our Western and 1.World countries, it has become fashion that young people travel to third world countries and for example work as aid workers for Humanitarian Organizations, maybe out of the goodness of their heart or because it looks well on a resume to show that you are someone that cares. One blogger wrote about people travelling to third world countries: “I saw so many hungry and starving kids. It was unbelievable!”  This is a too common occurrence in the experience of people who visit Third World Countries and get shocked and in awe of the witnessing of Starving Children, and provides insight into how lucky the rest of us are to have high standards of living that are actually met.”

A question that brings itself to the forefront is whether we are actually lucky or if that is yet another word we have used to justify the fact that we are Equally Responsible for reproducing and recreating starvation and poverty? We know that people starve. We know the figures and the images of starving children. But do we see them as our neighbors, Equally Living Here on this planet or as spots of guilty conscience on our minds? Do people then go to third world countries, only to return with a feeling of relief that it is not them who are in the shoes of those that suffer?

Google as indicator of Ignorance

If you Google the words: “How does it feel to starve?” you will be surprised to find that the first ten results are questions people have asked in regards to how it feels to starve to death – literally posed and categorized as “trivia questions” – as something people ask for fun or out of curiosity. There are articles about being anorexic or how to starve oneself to get the perfect looks. An example is an article called: “how can you starve yourself without slowing down your metabolism?” If we take Google as a representation of what we as people in the west are willing to consider and investigate in regards to starvation, this is what is revealed about us. We don’t care – even when we say we do, even when we sell and buy products with labels that say we do – we don’t care. Because otherwise we would do something about it. We don’t want to know what it feels like to Starve.

Starves Real Child to Feed Virtual Child

In 2008 there was an article in several newspapers about a Korean couple who starved their child to death, because they were busy raising a virtual child at the local internet café. The virtual child, called Anima in Latin ironically translates to: “A living Being”.

A police man later told the local media that: “The couple seemed to have lost their will to live a normal life because they didn’t have jobs and gave birth to a premature baby,” “They indulged themselves in the online game of raising a virtual character so as to escape from reality, which led to the death of their real baby.”

This situation is indicative for the current situation in this World, where people of the West are living in virtual realities of their Minds, while disregarding and neglecting the Physical entirely. And why? Because Reality is too hard to Face – because there is no hope anyway and so one might as well lose oneself in the endless layers of information and stimulation provided by The Mind as thought and feeling and manifested into Reality through games such as the one described above. Entertainment is nothing but the suppression of the Fear of not Surviving that is already dictating and directing our lives. We might read this story and be appalled, but who of us has not gotten lost within the entertaining of our Minds?  What are people actually doing but watching television all night or being busy imagining their future lives? So many people live only for that which is created through and as the Mind, while the Physical is forced to tag along and live out our cravings, desires and nightmares. So this couple depict in brutal clarity the situation of what we have Allowed Ourselves to be and become: Consumed with fear and powerlessness, turning to virtual realities which we try to keep alive, while the Actual Physical Reality, as Who we are – Suffers.

The Hard Facts of Starvation

In spite of the Fact that there is currently more than 1 billion people (every 6. Person on the planet) Starving – the world produces enough food to feed everyone.  World agriculture produces 17 percent more calories per person today than it did 30 years ago, despite a 70 percent population increase. This is enough to provide everyone in the world with at least 2,720 kilocalories (kcal) per person per day (FAO 2002, p.9).  The principal problem is that many people in the world do not have sufficient land to grow, or income to purchase, enough food.  (worldhunger.org)

What is the problem? And is there a Solution?

As stated above, the main cause of hunger is poverty and the main cause of poverty is the lack of money. Poverty is furthermore re-created and reproduced through generations, which means that virtually no one born into a country with extreme poverty has any chance of every getting out of the living hell that they are born into. This is all do to an extreme income inequality, where half the world’s population are literally carrying the other half like dead weight on their shoulders – and I am not talking about the rich carrying the poor, quite the contrary.

Patrick Bond writes: “The question as to who and what is responsible for African underdevelopment can be answered at two levels. Firstly, the answer is that the operation of the imperialist system bears major responsibility for African economic retardation by draining African wealth and by making it impossible to develop more rapidly the resources of the continent.”

What are the consequences? – Inequality Placed into Perspective

Looking at the world as a whole, with a 6. Of the world’s population living in poverty and starvation it is obvious that it is not what is Best for All. But too often do we see the world as separated in smaller units that have no influence on each other. Placed into perspective we can use the following metaphor: Imagine a body. Imagine that as you eat and drink, you pull all nutrition from one limb such as the leg or an arm and instead only disperse nutrition into the rest of the body and primarily the head. Imagine having a leg or an arm, completely starved and sucked dry, the muscle issue deteriorating, the skin becoming thin, sensitive and you cannot stand the feeling of pressure or clothes against it. Imagine you dragging your leg after you because it has lost all its muscle mass and are no longer able to function. Imagine the bones of your arm breaking as easily as glass and while the rest of your body is in better condition, this limb is constantly filled with excruciating pain. This is basically what we are doing at this planet, where a 6. Of us are starving to death having exactly these experiences as described above. Now imagine the body being all warped with a big fat head, legs so skinny that they cannot stand and arms and hands worn from working all day.

If the Earth was a single Human physical body

If Earth was a Human Physical body, this is basically what we would look like. Would we be able to stand, walk or move? Probably not. It is unacceptable that people suffer when there is in fact enough food in the world, it shouldn’t matter that it is someone else and not us and only something we care about when we place ourselves in another’s shoes – because when one suffers, all suffers consequently. It is not someone else, in some other world, separate from us that suffer – what we do and how we live is directly influencing what is happening in other parts of the world.

The people that are starving have no possible way of changing their situation. Their situation is caused by unequal distribution of resources and by our collective Acceptance of a money-system of inequality as the Directive Principle that is managing the world and everyone in it. How are we equally Participating in upholding and accepting these systems? By turning our backs on those Suffering, because we don’t Act. We either blame our governments, each other or ourselves, but that doesn’t in fact Change the situation – it only makes us feel powerless and from there we can again justify that we are not responsible. Imagine standing in front of a mother starving with a dying child. What do you think she will tell you? Do you think she will blame you or ask you to feel bad for her? Is the Solution to finish our meals or send our leftovers to Africa or Indonesia? No – none of this will change the situation, because the root of the problem is the entire world-system as a whole – a system that is based on our Acceptance of and daily participation in an unequal distribution of resources.

How can we Participate in Bringing about Change?

The systems with which we manage our world, determines the lives we live. The money-system does not exist by itself – it is managed and supported by Human Beings. This is why we propose an Equal Money System, because whether we can feel it or not, whether we can imagine ourselves in the shoes of those suffering or not: we are All Equally Here on this Earth and as such have an Equal Right to a Dignified Life.

It is imperative that each of us Face ourselves within Self-Honesty about how we are Participating in Allowing the world to exist the way it does – this is not easy as we have existed within separate mind-bubbles of Separation, Inferiority and Fear and in this not been able to See and Realize that we are Equally Responsible for what is Here.

Through The Desteni I Process we re-educate ourselves to Self-Honesty, Self-Responsibility and Self-Respect. We do this through some very simple tools that each can Apply for themselves, through Applying and Living the Common Sense of What is Best for All, bringing ourselves Back Here to Earth and out of the Separate Mind-Bubbles of Self-Interest, Denial and Fear. We do this through Supporting each other to keep it Real, To Realize Ourselves within and as the Whole – Standing together as All as One as Equals. Join The Process Towards World Equality – Support and Participate in bringing about an Equal Money System For The End of The Human Annihilation of Life – For The End of Suffering and Abuse and for Bringing Forth a Life that Cares for All Life Equally.