In a prologue to John Ford's 1941 film of "The Grapes of Wrath," the narrator tells the viewer that the Joad family has been "driven from their fields by natural disasters and economic changes beyond anyone's control." The tone is unnecessarily defensive, as if protecting some category of person on whom movie audiences might blame the Great Depression.

No cabal is responsible for either the Depression or the condition of Ethiopia's nomads. But we may ask whether we, as an affluent society and civilization, find it tolerable that people in our midst starve not because there's no food, but because they have no money. Is it, indeed, "beyond anyone's control" to stop the people in these pictures — and so many others like them — from starving to death?

—Tony Karon