Facts are stubborn things.
John Adams

The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.
Flannery O’Connor

I want you to imagine that you woke up this morning to the following headline: “One Hundred Jetliners Crash, Killing 26,500.” Pandemonium would break out across the world as heads of state, parliaments, and congresses convened to grapple with the nature and the causes of this tragedy. Think about the avalanche of media coverage that would ignite around the globe as reporters shared the shocking news and communicated its implications. Air travel would grind to a halt as governments shut down the airlines and panicked air travelers canceled their trips. The National Transportation Safety Board and perhaps the FBI, CIA, and local law enforcement agencies and their international equivalents would mobilize investigations and dedicate whatever manpower was required to understand what happened and to prevent it from happening again.

Now imagine that the very next day, one hundred more planes crashed – and one hundred more the next, and the next, and the next. It is unimaginable that something this terrible could ever happen.

But it did – and it does.

It happened today, and it happened yesterday. It will happen again tomorrow. But there was no media coverage. No heads of state, parliaments, or congresses stopped what they were doing to address the crises, and no investigations were launched. Yet more than 26,500 children died yesterday of preventable causes related to their poverty, and it will happen again today and tomorrow and the day after that. Almost 10 million children will be dead in the course of a year. So why does the crash of a single plane dominate the front pages of newspapers across the world while the equivalent of one hundred planes filled with children crashing daily never reaches our ears? And even though we now have the awareness, the access, and the ablility to stop it, why have we chosen not to? Perhaps one reason is that these kids who are dying are not our kids; they’re somebody else’s.
Richard Stearns president – World Vision