This is addressed to anyone out there who thinks he or she is a moral person.

Most people generally think they have a moral duty to help others. In Peter Singer's famous essay, Famine, Affluence, and Morality, he presents us with the following situation. You are walking to work past a shallow pond and you notice a small child in the pond, drowning. Most people would say that you have a moral duty to rescue that child. Considerations such as getting your new suit dirty, or being late to work are insignificant next to the life of the drowning child.

Most people's lives do not match this belief, however. Singer argues that the plight of destitute children, wherever they might be around the world, is analogous to that of the drowning child. Everyone knows that there are millions of starving children around the world at this very moment. Nearly everyone knows, furthermore, that they could easily help at least one, but probably many, of those children just by putting a small donation in the mail to some reputable charity, if not doing something with even more impact, like adopting a child, or volunteering to help those children directly. All it takes is to forgo a couple lattes a week, or a couple of CDs or books a month, to send a sizeable check to Oxfam.

However, nearly everyone pays no attention to this on a daily basis. In other words, nearly everyone walks by the shallow pond and lets the child drown. So, as you're surfing around the internet, looking at your friends' pictures, or buying a new iPod, or a new CD or DVD, or going out to eat, or to the bar to have a few drinks, or even if you're sipping your free trade coffee, or driving around in your hybrid Prius, think about this:

Every year more than 10 million children under the age of five will die, and 6 million of those deaths are preventable. If we take just 6 million deaths per year, that equals out to 16,438 deaths daily that could be prevented, or 684 deaths per hour, or 11 deaths per minute. So in the time that it takes you to read this, somewhere between 10 and 50 children will have drowned in the shallow pond, while you whistled happily by.