I think I want to go into the porn industry. If you know me, it's a long shot. I possess none of the attributes of a typical porn star -- my milky skin tone and big nose are not necessarily desirable. My motives, however, are not egotistical. They are strictly financial.
Recently, I found that the porn industry brings in $3,075 every second on purchases for porn, which seems crazy because people can get their porn for free on the Internet. Every second 28,258 Internet users are viewing pornography, 372 Internet users are typing adult search terms into search engines, and every 39 minutes a new pornographic video is being created in the United States. Those statistics are staggering, right? They're making over $14 billion annually and the demand doesn't seem to be waning. So why not go into the porn industry?
Well, there are plenty of reasons for ME not to go into the porn industry. I'll spare you the details. So, as opposed to entering the porn industry, I'm just going to ask them to give 1% of the 14 billion they make each year to help end hunger around the world. That's 140 million dollars.
According to the World Health Organization, hunger is the greatest, and gravest, single threat to the world's public health. Each year, over one billion people are affected by malnutrition and starvation. Let's put that into context: There are just over six billion people on earth. That means one out of every people is dying from hunger. If we were to make it so that all the starving and malnourished people were spread out evenly across the globe, that would mean every time you went to watch your favorite football team, nine players would be disabled due to malnourishment or starvation. Every time you went to see a boy band, one member would be struggling to dance and sing. Every time you sat down to dinner with your family, your mother, father, sister or brother would be visibly crippled -- their organs failing, their cognitive skills diminishing, their skin hanging from their bones.
But the reality is that the starving and malnourished people are not spread evenly across the globe. They're predominantly in third world countries where people like us don't have to really and truly deal with them on a daily basis. So we don't see them on the street, we don't see them at our jobs, and we surely don't see them at our kitchen table. They're not performing when we go to games or concerts. They exist only in a world far away.
In my travels to Africa, I ran across many people suffering from malnutrition and starvation. One of these people was a young girl named Gloria. She is two years old and has the darkest, most beautiful brown eyes you've ever seen. Her smile travels from ear to ear. And she wears a red bracelet that would be beautiful, if it didn't stand for something so devastating. The bracelet works on the same color scale as the terrorist threat level chart or traffic lights. Green is good to go, but everything in between is a warning sign. Yellow and orange are increasingly dangerous, and there is little hope for those that wear red. Gloria is on the brink of not coming back. Her bone-thin arms easily fit the red bracelet and her frame is smaller than that of a newborn.
Ideally, we would give Gloria food over the next three weeks that would push her into the green. This therapeutic food is the only thing capable of hitting the mark on her peanut-sized stomach to restore Gloria's life. But that food costs money. Forty-nine dollars for three weeks to be precise. If we don't give her this Mother Administered Nutritive Aid (MANA) she will die. So we have the cure, we just don't have the money. Unless, of course, the porn industry steps up... So what do you say pornographers?! If you gave 1% of your abundant profits, you could restore life to just under three million people. Not a bad deal, right?
But, just in case they don't ante up, we've got a few other thing up our sleeve. Stay tuned, and together we will end hunger.