For decades, diarrhea alone has killed more than two thousand children a day. Thanks largely to Trump, COVID-19 has become one of the only global catastrophes to disproportionately affect Americans. Yet if all of us are truly equal, humanity’s moral seismograph will barely register a tremor. We may not be sociopathic enough to write off Trump’s “shithole countries” altogether, but can any of us genuinely say we’ve done enough to help our poor? By biblical standards, probably not.

Rev. Dr. William Barber, one of the leaders of the Poor People’s Campaign and a personal hero, is not shy about calling out hypocrisy.

“Whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.”— Matthew 25:45, NIV

Jesus vehemently condemned not just oppressors of the poor, but those who did not actively intervene to help. According to GiveWell’s rigorous analysis of some of the most effective charitable interventions available, it costs around $4,000 to save a child’s life. An average American household making $62,000 a year may not have that kind of money lying around, but could probably save it over a few months to provide life-saving surgery for a close friend, spouse, or child.

Breaking with the tradition of his Chidian peers, Singer is an influential anti-poverty and animal welfare advocate who takes his work beyond the theoretical and into his day-to-day life.

Granted, forcing citizens of the wealthiest country on Earth to worry about paying for a critical medical procedure in the first place is immoral, but the spectrum of privilege we so frequently discuss in the United States starts well beyond where that of the global poor ends.

None of this makes the coronavirus any less tragic. You should feel heartbroken. You should feel pissed off. But after Trump and COVID-19 are relegated to our history books and the thousands who die every day aren’t on TV anymore, you have to decide not to forget about them. Unless you make a conscious choice to care, we will all succumb to the apathy that metastasizes every form of human privilege.

Ironically, the first step toward doing the most good you can do is letting go of the idea you’ll ever get there. For instance, I own dozens of bow ties and waste countless hours quixotically refactoring code. I know I’ll never be truly moral, but trying feels good enough that pure self-interest keeps me from giving up. That said, measuring our actions against an impossible standard still hurts at first, and your well-evolved brain will try to get you to stop. So before it does, do as many of these as you can right now:

Our broken world is a choice all of us make. Nothing less than the fate of humanity will depend on your honest answer to simple question: