"We Are So Blessed"

What with the Lay Ministry Weekend and the 30 Hour Famine, discussions of American privilege have been semi-common in my life lately.  It has become kind of the popular thing for someone to nod their head seriously and say in a low voice, "We're so blessed, you know?  So blessed."

This drives me crazy.  It makes me want to pull out my hair and scream.

Because really?  Is this news?  We live in a country that offers us plenty of freedoms.  Everyone I know has a house and a bed and a car and a cell phone.  Saying we are blessed is akin to saying, "I prefer not burning to death" or "Cadbury Cream Eggs are really really good."  I don't need to be hit with an obvious stick.

What I want is for people to move past the part where we are blessed and start asking why this is so.  Why are Americans in general richer than most of the world?  Why am I specifically the owner of a car, a computer, and a sizable bank account?

I don't think the answer is simply so that I can sit around happy that I wasn't raised in Niger.  That is the selfish way out, but even worse, it's selfishness covered in ignorance.  Give me someone who gleefully hoards their money and tells the poor to scram over someone who innocently hoards their money while looking at the poor with pity.  Honesty over hypocrisy any day.

So let's stop talking about how blessed we are.  Let's start using the material and political and spiritual blessings that God has given us to impact the poor, to balance the world's rich/poor divide, to take care of orphans and widows, and to bring about God's kingdom on earth as it is in heaven.

Faith without action is dead, after all.