Several years ago the front page of the New York Times showed a nine-year-old Vietnamese girl running toward us, her flesh aflame from napalm.  A few years later papers printed the picture of a seven-year-old Libyan girl crawling toward a Red Cross shelter, both of her feet amputated by on eof our “precision” bombs.  We may weep at such sights, but our taxes buy the weapons that bring them about. 

Perhaps the darkest dimension to the accumulation of wealth is the exploitation of cheap labor to procure the luxuries we’ve grown used to.  If you had a cup of coffee this morning, as I did, you participated:  “In Africa a healthy young adult male cannot possibly make more than $1.50 a day picking coffee.  It is no wonder that women and children are compelled to share in the picking.”  If we paid the East African pickers the minimum American wage, we could not afford to drink the coffee.

(Taken from The Signature of Jesus by: Brennan Manning)