Small Wonder.

Barbara Kingsolver’s book of essays is making me cry in my car (see audiobook tribute below). It is a searing love letter to wilderness, an indictment of unbridled consumerism and war, an earnest argument that our love for our lives and each other is the only thing that might redeem us. With her inimitable mix of compassion and steel, she exposes the hypocrisy and hubris of American imperialism, gently but resolutely skewering the greed and blindness of our bloated erstwhile democracy. Kingsolver captures the grief we feel for the country we love – for what it used to be, and the pale shadow of its founding ideals it parades on the world stage today.

Small Wonder, published in 2002, was written largely in response to the September 11 attacks, in an attempt to make sense of the unfathomable. In it, Kingsolver tells us that according to the United Nations, it would only take an extra $13 billion above and beyond then-current expenditures to provide every person in the world with basic healthcare and nutrition.

$13 billion. Even though today it would doubtless be more, it’s still a tiny fraction of the $700 billion the Treasury Secretary has demanded that we, the American taxpayers, hand over, double quick, no questions asked, to bail out Wall Street – with no oversight, no help for homeowners and no equity stake for us investors. $700 billion is roughly the same amount that has been spent on the catastrophically wrong-headed Iraq war – the war that has bankrupted our defense coffers and crippled our standing in the world. The entire bailout proposal, pushed with such breathless urgency by President Paulson and Co., is so outrageous as to beggar belief. Fortunately it’s getting some push-back from both sides of the aisle – Democratics and Republicans alike are nixing the blank check idea – but chances are Congress will pass it in some form. What an inheritance for our children and grandchildren. The U.S. was already staggering under a record burden of debt, but now, unbelievably, future generations will suffer even more for the unbridled corruption and greed of a relative few.

The idea that the entire world’s hunger and illness could be alleviated for an almost negligible portion of the bailout money is both sobering and infuriating. Says Kingsolver, “We have the resources to behave more generously than we do.” Extolling our amber waves of grain and our purple mountain majesties, she contends, “We could crown this good with brotherhood…what a vast inheritance for our children that would be…if we were to become a nation humble before our rich birthright, whose graciousness makes us beloved.”

If, indeed.