My teacher, Mr Haskett, says that our bucket was overflowing with cans (and you know how big those Second Harvest can buckets are--pretty big). He also said barely anyone else in any of the other classes donated to their cans. So we won by a landslide. Yay!
But isn't that sad? Barely anyone donated to their buckets.
Forget about the pizza party in the end and think, for a moment, what this means. Lets imagine, for a moment, that the few classes that participated in this contest represent the world (or the USA). My class, my one class, out of about ten other classes, donated enough to overfill the bucket. But none of the other classes even made a layer of cans on the bottom of their bucket. If there are 32 students per class, and ten classes participating, that means 320 students participated. Now of course, not every student will participate anyway; so in just my class, I imagine about 20 to 25 students participated, myself included. That means, out of 320 students, only about 25 students donated cans. That's only 7.8% of the total participating people.
7.8%.
Now imagine if that was the world. Out of seven billion people, that means only 546,000,000 people donated cans. That might look like a large number--that's because it is--but compared to seven billion, 5.46x10^8 people is rather small.
Okay, so maybe that wasn't the best comparison; to me that number looks outrageously large; but the reality is that there are poor people out there who live on the streets and don't rummage up enough money to buy themselves even a whopper at Burger King, and kids who don't have parents anymore, and adults that don't even have jobs anymore, and only 7.8% of the populace has the guts to go down to Safeway and spend $15 on 15 cans of food--enough to give at least 10 people a meal.
If people weren't so interested in only themselves, maybe the world would be a better place. Sometimes you have to reach down and help those who have tripped get back to their feet.
No comments:
Post a Comment