Recently I've taken to reminding myself, my friends, and anyone I come across how wealthy we are. I was doing so at a workshop I was teaching a while ago and someone looked at me with a "well of course you're wealthy, you're the writer!" (Proving, yet again, the sad truth that everyone believes all writers earn vast advances!!) This time though I didn't protest that I have never had one of those juicy big advances blah blah blah - I explained instead that I mean us - here - in the 'West' are rich. That as long as we have even the most basic of education and housing we are infinitely wealthy compared to more than half the world. In the so-called first world when the third world is (literally) starving to give us good coffee, we are all well and truly 'wealthy' by comparison.

Two years ago I had breast cancer and when I went in for surgery the small room I was sharing with another woman who was going for the same as me was dirty. Really. Properly grubby. Used tissues on the floor. There were no cleaners that morning for some reason and it was really unpleasant. The other woman was also in for breast cancer surgery and we were so nervous we cleaned the room ourselves - it was a wonderful distraction. And as we did so we reminded ourselves how lucky we were not to be having breast cancer in Kosovo, which was on the front pages of all our newspapers that day. How lucky anyone (even the poorest among us in the UK) is to have access to medical care. I was in Siberia on a book trip earlier this year - they were not shocked when I came out as gay, they were shocked when I came out as having had a bad cancer two years ago - even now, they have hardly any drug therapies available to them, women like me in their 30's are still expected to die of breast cancer. And they do.

As I write, Ethiopians are starving so we can go to our poncey coffee shops and drink cheap coffee. (With hormone-enhanced milk by the way.) We use the internet, we value the global village. Simply by the fact of our running water and freedom to talk about these issues - we are rich. Isn't it time to share? Of course you can, if you must, blame the Ethiopian famine and the dreadful food conditions in much of Africa at the moment, on their 'bad' governments (because of course ours are always perfect, right?), their mishandling of crops or stocks ­ alternatively you can blame it on the fact that we in the West prop up these bad governments when it suits us and topple them when it doesn't. We all know how long the US & most of Europe supported the Taliban for example. You can blame the weather as being not very kind to Africa for the past decade or so, or you can acknowledge that the reason for both the droughts and the deluges is our Western contribution to global warming. Our fridges, our cars, our wealth, their poverty.

It's all very well to say, as someone did to me after September 11th : "Why should I care about people who hate me just because they're jealous of how much I have because I live in a great country?" For God's sake ­ they're not jealous, they're STARVING. And denied education and brutally oppressed (so often by the right wing regimes our so-called 'aware' countries support ­ eg. the UK in Pinochet's Argentina & the US in Nicaragua) and barely getting through the day. Anyway, not one of us alive today made the wealthy Western countries rich of our own actions, every single one of is here in the West by an accident of birth, nothing else. We don't DESERVE what we have, we got lucky. We got born in the nice place at the nice time. Further, it pays to remember how the West got this rich in the first place. No European country is innocent ­ Spain, France, Germany, Belgium, Portugal, Holland, England, Italy, Greece ­ colonists and invaders all. And the US need look only to its most very recent past to see the brutal slavery its own wealth is largely based on. (And yes, this is the slave trade from which England profited hugely too.)

And I don't know what to do any more than anyone else does. But I'm sick of pretending it will get better without us trying. I'm tired of believing we can make changes simply by voting someone new into office every four years. It doesn't work. We know it doesn't work. Half the time we know we didn't even vote for those in office and yet we find them there anyway. I'm for reading and talking. Way cleverer people than me have already said it loads of times in many different ways - Naomi Klein's No Logo, Michael Moore's Stupid White Men, Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation. Bill Bryson's new African Diary is supposed to be pretty good. Mark Thomas and Robert Newman in the UK are comedian/activists who are saying really interesting things. Walter Mosley's new non-fiction treatise What Next: An African American Initiative Toward World Peace, to be published in the spring, suggests (among other things) small talking and reading groups. Makes sense to me. Count your blessings. Buy Fair Trade goods whenever possible. Begin to realise that we are responsible for everyone else. And if you happen to be a Jew, Christian or Muslim, you'll know being your brother's keeper is a religious obligation from the oldest books of faith ­- and if you're an atheist, what better reason to make this life a beneficial one to all people, than because there is no other?

Really, I have no solutions. None all of my own, though I'm very excited that others I respect and trust are beginning to suggest some. The one thing I do know is that I am no longer prepared to be quiet about what I see is wrong simply because I don't yet have the answer to all the different wrongs I see. I'm bored with not talking about it just in case I further my reputation as a loud mouth. I already have that reputation, I'm interested now in how I can make it work for me!! If you agree with me, great, talk to someone else about it. If you donšt agree with me, great, talk to someone else about it. But let's at least get on with the dialogue. We like to think we live in the global village now, you're reading this because of that 'village' idea ­ and yeah, like all of us, I like living in the village's Big House. But I know I'm only here because there are people sleeping in shacks at the bottom of the garden. For the world's wealth to be shared equally there's a very good chance we in the West might have to get a bit poorer. I honestly think that would be a price well worth paying. A fairer distribution of our resources might at least take us a little closer to that goal of World Peace we've been bleating on about for so long.

I want to be honest and I want my life to be of value. I'm looking for the how. I know I'm not the only one.

Know how? Agree? Disagree? Go ahead: let it out! Tell us about it on the Tart City Message Board...