COLUMN LEFT/ STEPHEN L. GOLDSTEIN : Myanmar-- Promised Land for U.S. Poor : We rush to help starving children in Somalia, overlooking those in America.

Poor and needy people in America could get all the help they need overnight from the United States government--if only they all would flee to Myanmar.

Historically, it has been shown that American sympathy for people in distress increases in direct proportion to the distance that they are away from our own shores. We have no tolerance for poor people in America. We send Haitians back to the most destitute country in the Western Hemisphere as fast as they wash up on our beaches. But show us suffering at least 5,000 miles away in a country we never heard of, and every one of us becomes a bleeding heart.

Myanmar, which used to be called Burma, is halfway around the world. For American sensibility, you can’t do much better than that. With the proper game plan, Myanmar could become the Promised Land of American milk and honey--if only our needy would go there.

Just think of the possibilities for the evening news. Dan Rather, Peter Jennings and Tom Brokaw could show us the exodus of our unwashed multitudes. There might even be a bit part for Charlton Heston.

It would take about a month of nightly pictures of formerly homeless people in America on the streets of Yangon (formerly Rangoon) until we forgot that they once were ours. Then a backlash of compassion would overwhelm us. People would say, “No one should be living in the streets like that” and, “Only a corrupt and inhumane government would allow its people to suffer in that way.”

Imagine the gush of warm woolly feeling if we saw (formerly American, now Burmese) crack babies struggling for life in meager, understaffed hospitals in Myanmar. Before you could say “incubator,” we would dispatch relief planes to save the children. There’s no telling how many infertile yuppie couples would board Air Burma in a flash, to adopt the infants and bring them back to their native United States. Thank God for the charity of suburban America.

Those Americans who lack a photogenic infirmity or a sufficiently televisable debility--say the tens of millions who don’t have health care or are unemployed--would be wise to start a civil war in Myanmar. Depend on it: The Defense Department would eventually put them on its payroll; their worries--alas, and maybe their lives--would be over.

Call me Scrooge, but I’d really like to know where we get the money and the moral will to send troops into Somalia when we have been so indifferent to the plight of our own people. How come we can’t find a proverbial dime to help people who lost their jobs because Washington savants and captains of industry botched the economy? How come we can’t find the money to rehabilitate criminals?

Don’t get me wrong. I am as devastated as the next person when I see graphic pictures of starving children with distended stomachs in the arms of mothers who hardly have the strength to shoo away the ubiquitous flies. I can’t find any adjective strong enough to describe my rage at the Somali warlords who keep food and medical supplies from reaching dying people.

But it is time for Americans to start looking at our problems as though they were of our own making--because they are. Poverty in America is an embarrassment to us; that’s why we try to ignore it. In the world’s richest country, we insist, anyone in need must have a character flaw. It can’t be our system that’s flawed. We are so eager to go to the aid of the needy in far-flung nations because it calls attention to the other governments’ failure, diverting it from the shortcomings of our own.

Tell us about a distant country where the infant mortality rate is 24th among the world’s industrialized nations, and we pant to do something about it. Tell us about a remote nation in which the chief cause of death among young black men is homicide, and we grieve. Tell us about an exotic place in which the average net worth of a black household is a little more than $4,000, and we bleed. And yet, when I tell you that I have just described America, our collective silence is deafening.

Myanmar has too many problems of its own, not the least of which is finding a more sonorous name for its country. I think we’re going to have to save the money that any airlift of our poor there might cost.

We’re calling our mission to Somalia “Restore Hope.” I would suggest that a domestic version of “Restore Hope” is overdue. Let our President-elect be forewarned: Hope doesn’t last for more than four years. We must have the resolve to save the world, including America.