Oh. Wait. Sorry. My bad.
Here’s more on the Yes Men. And thanks, BuzzFlash, for the link.
-
Search It!
-
Recent Entries
- All good things etc.
- A little more reading with Sunday’s column…
- You should go hold a baby.
- Every Tuesday at 11:45 a.m….
- Jesus occupied Jerusalem
- Black Friday madness!
- Perhaps the most awesome request for donations, ever
- Tax the very rich, right now
- Sometimes? You just have to say no.
- Check out this Baptist minister’s take on environmentalism:
-
Links
“The French they are a silly race, Parlez-vous?”
Rubbish. Whenever they drag Colonialism into the issue of world poverty, they’ve lost the argument. Broad, sweeping generalizations about the worlds poor does nothing to solve a serious problem. Stop living in a pre-fab past and look at the problems as they exists today.
Finger-pointing sells movies, but does little but to line the pockets of film makers.
Looking forward without looking back will doom us to failure.
…Sort of, however it is not “World Poverty” that we need to address. It is poor people, who are living and dying everyday, regardless of some foolish movie. Each case is unique and with different needs. Standing around, drinking your bottled water laying blame solves nothing for the child drinking unsafe water. Shut up, do something and back off. (Not you, vegas, those Heelocks.)
I get what you’re saying, I think. But until there’s political will to do something, one lone person isn’t very effective in battling poverty — world or otherwise.
So your solution is? Because I think these kinds of stunts can serve a purpose; if nothing else, these pranks can call attention to the way certain breeds of capitalism work.
My solution is to call the Cats, get the bones of Joan “De Arc,” clone her and let her get an army together and stamp out those who stand in the way of Gods creatures creating the life they should have, safe, healthy and free. We have fought wars for a lot of stupid reasons. How about for the rights of every man, woman and child?
Ah, but we generally tell ourselves and others that those are precisely the rights we fighting for, whatever the war. How do we make it so?
I find it hilarious that you can sit around talking about these issues on a blog and then slam other people for doing basically the same thing. They’re just talking about it, it’s okay to talk about it.
Talk is cheap. Go to the theater and try to see the movie for free. The UN talks about it. They also do something about it. The USA does things, as do other countries. It is not easy. But we try. We dig wells, we send food. We teach. They steal the wells. They take the food. They kill woman and children in schools. We still try. A movie about poverty in India did not make a difference. A little Nun did. She did it without calling on the past.
We may not be on opposite sides here, Mario. First, people have to be made aware of the problem.
Did Mother Theresa make a difference for poverty in India? I mean, I know she helped feed some folks, and helped others die in dignity but I thought her take wasn’t poverty eradication. I’ll be happy to stand corrected.But I do know that in her AIDS hospice in SF, the patients slept on mattresses on the floor, even though bedstands had been donated and everyone had to go to church. They also threw out a bunch of perfectly good carpet.
Now, Bill and Melinda Gates are doing something.
No one person can make a total difference with poverty, however, a little help goes a long way. I met someone who went to India to help her. If not for her, he would never have gone. I’m sure that in a small way, he made a difference in someones life. We tend to look at solving problems as an absolute. Help as many as you can, encourage others to do the same and we can change the world.
Yes, one of the criticisms of Mother Teresa was that she could have done more to point out the root causes of poverty and work to change the systems that cause it. She tended to focus on the victims, to feed them and help them to die in relative comfort.
That, in itself, is not a bad thing.
I guess it’s a matter of fishing the floating babies out of the stream, or walking upstream to see why the babies are in the water in the first place.