RantsCounterRants: Oh right, I'm being frugal now...

Puh-leez!  Did you catch this article in NYT about the well-to-do having to do less well?

Do you think these people sound like taxes on dividends are unduly burdening them?

A jet for under a million my eye...why can't they just drive the Jag to work like everybody else?  now wouldn't that be frugal?

8:58:07 PM    comment []

RantsCounterRants:  America’s no longer a leader…

Two things I've heard and seen in the last week have depressed me greatly about America’s ability to act as a leader.  A moral, ethical leader, one with values which mean the poor and downtrodden are helped and not left to suffer.

Remember the Statue of Liberty, what she stands for, Lazarus' poem reminding us she lifts her "lamp beside the golden door”?

A television advertisement aired this week, showing homeless children, dirty, raggedy, caring for themselves.  Some looked school age, some looked like barely mobile toddlers.  Gripping stuff visually to a mother.  The voice-over reminds us that 14 MILLION children UNDER THE AGE OF FIVE around the world are left orphaned by the AIDS epidemic. I shudder to think about the mortality rate or the horrific chance for abuse.  I cry my eyes out after the ad cuts away.  This 14 million is only a fraction of the larger wave that is building, one that will nearly decimate the continent of Africa.  Imagine how many children in total are impacted if we are looking only at those under the age of five.

Where is our moral outrage, our indignation?  Of course, these children are not voters HERE; they can’t write, can’t speak anti-American epithets over there (wherever that is) – therefore we can turn our backs, tell Lady Liberty to turn that lamp on us alone?

National Public Radio ran a piece yesterday on Sudanese civil war; mentioned is the falling amount of foreign aid.  As an example, a woman who fled civil war in Sudan is featured.  She receives allotments of food on a monthly basis from the UN food aid program.  She must sell much of the food for fuel, leaving her with not enough food to feed her SEVEN CHILDREN each month.  Worse, the refugee camp in which she lives has been victimized by bandits who beat, rape and kill refugees.  How does this woman protect herself, protect her children?  Must she make “Sophie’s Choice” if she flees back to her war-torn home?  How many of these children did she bear while in this camp – does she not have access to birth control methods?  How many more must she bear and feed, might any of them have been produced by rape (by either bandits or her spouse)? 

The questions are mind-boggling.  And we are noticeably absent, removed.  Do we, the American public, know whether we are doing anything to encourage negotiations? (Doubtful, even though Sudan has oil resources.) 

Our current leaders have chosen to turn their backs on women and children around the globe by telling them no funding will be provided for reproductive education. 

Our government is not taking a leadership role on resolving the AIDS epidemic and the rest of childhood illnesses in third-world countries (in fact, putting aside what I think of Microsoft’s marketing practices, Bill Gates and his wife Melinda shown far more leadership by funding vaccine programs for the poor of the world).

We are silent as we were during the Rwandan massacre.  We couldn’t even muster outrage until after nearly a million deaths in a few short weeks (and we may have been in part to blame).  Our blind-eye to misery costs us dearly in the court of world opinion, or haven't we learned that yet?

Which led me to think: does Lady Liberty’s lamp shine only on the way in to our country?  Or does the lamp's light show us the way out to our real role in the world?

10:34:56 AM    comment []