2005-07-06 - 12:33

Live 8 Fall out.

This is me a little angry. But also a little helpless because I don’t know what I can do about this. Last weekend the world held a big, warm and fuzzy hand-holding concert in order to raise awareness that there is a lot of unnecessary poverty in Africa. Well, our awareness stopped at 8 pm on Saturday evening .

Seriously, these things are related. Developing nations don’t have enough money to buy medicine. Developing nations that are most likely to be afflicted by certain diseases don’t have the money to buy medicine. Developed nations have the money and are stockpiling the medicine.

I suppose I should feel relieved that my government is taking steps to prevent a national disaster. But I don’t. Instead, I feel like I should be doing something to help the people who are more likely to get sick. I said in my essay that there had to be one thing that I could do (or not do) that would at the very least cut down on my contribution to the misery of others. I still don’t know what that is.

But it’s yet another complicated issue. My friend Mike, a white, protestant, well-educated man and I were talking the other day about multiplicity in American culture. He pointed out that, being at the top, change hard to want to happen because it means that if you’re being more inclusive, and you’ve always had everything, you now have to give something up. My comment was that this is often perceived as an attack, and he thought it was. I don’t think of it as an attack, I think of it as an assertion. If I fit the requirements of how we define the word human being than I want to be treated as one. We’ve opened up that definition a lot in the last couple hundred years, remember Dred Scot? The thing is, definitions can change all they want, it’s the people, the culture that has to change for their to be any difference.

So, I don’t know. I have to go to the gym now, partly out of vanity and partly because I don’t want to be a burden on the community in forty years. Then, I may email my senators and ask them to look into what can be done. Also, I think I may need to read Hind Swaraj again. Gandhi, that insane little stick insect said that we should be the change we want to see in the world.

0 Comments

Artificial Sound for the Artificial World: 2pac's greatest hits

Still more noir than you are.