Politics
Okay, I am going to talk about politics which is something I despise. I watched ER last night, I hope everyone else did as well. It featured Dr. Carter (Noah Wyle) going to the Sudan desert and helping deal with fugitives of the civil war. Carter's character asked of one of the other aid workers why no one had sent help for these hundreds of thousands of people being executed and tortured; the response was the because of the color of their skin.
Now I know that there is a lot of crap going on over in Africa right now with civil war, famine and a very jaded government system...forget the AIDS epidemic that is now infecting children. The response of skin color made the hair on my neck stand up, why aren't we helping more? We are so busy fighting a war in Iraq that will never be won and here are people who really need and want our help that we are ignoring. Is it because they have nothing to offer us? No oil or nature resources we find necessary? Or maybe because we are too busy arguing over who screwed up the Katrina response more, even in this country we can't help our own people even 6 months after the tragedy.
I don't know all the specifics about world news, nor do I want to know. I look at our government sometimes and I truly don't understand how we got into this position of only helping people who can help us, even to the point of ignoring our own citizens. A fine example is the poor state of the school system in this country, they are closing left and right up here, or increasing taxes just to make ends meet...the Iraq war budget is now at $86 billion isn't it? I think somehow the super power of the world has become super greedy and has purchased a large set of blinders to the real problems affecting this world and country.
posted by Michelle @ 3:46 PM
3 Comments:
Thanks for the article, a little light reading for me. I'm so glad we finally agree on something that involves politics.
Michelle -- Once you get beyond the established mind set that we could be doing more for the Africa in general - take a few factors into consideration. The U.S. donates more time, money, resources, food, young men, and hope than any other country in the world AND is able to pay for its military deployments all over the globe. That is not including private citizen and church donations to the problems that have not been sloved in Africa for the last 30 years. The truth of the matter is this - Africa's inability to get beyond their specific tribal mindsets and hate for each other, corrupt government officials squandering money we send, and dependence on a golbal welfare systems that only continues to enslave them,(make them dependent). Economics are complicated by their being no national language in Africa like in most world powers. Usually, there is the country language, the tribal language, and either french or english. Politics are not perfect - nor are the parties that direct our government - There are only best intentions by imperfect men/women. And maybe we could do more if the military was not gutted by over 100,000 in the Clinton years which I detested for this very reason -- the inabilty to take a noble cause. I was part of the Rwanda Massacre in the 90's.
I would rather see us fight a noble cause than the ones we are currently fighting. Sending money does nothing without action; we are in essence paying the criminal government figures. Someone needs to help empower the African people to make changes, help rid them of evil dictators...sound familiar? At least this time everything is destroyed before we help.
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