Once in a while in all I read to prepare for these pieces, I find myself in disbelief, encountering how evil humans can be. This week it was a story in The Guardian newspaper about what they called Libyan slave markets. Migrants, usually from West Africa, with little or cash and often with no papers, manage to pay people smugglers to get across the desert to the coast. The rescued migrant interviewed for this story tells of a bus ride organized by the Continue reading “Libyan Slave Market”
Category: Governance
An Anti-War Lesson
The tragedy in Syria, now in its 7th year, is inescapable to anyone who cares about what’s happening in the world. We have all been touched by the number of refugees escaping their war torn country, by the number of casualties, by the number of orphans, or wounded who have gone untreated. There’s also another aspect to the devastation of this war. Whether it’s been on the screen or in print, pictures of the destruction of several cities seem unparalleled. I for one have not been aware of a country with as much Continue reading “An Anti-War Lesson”
Donations to Resistance Groups
Have you heard of The Resistance? Not the Resistance that arose during WWII, the one that came into existence after the election of Donald Trump. The groups that make it up have all received windfalls since then. They are groups such as 350.org, a climate change group, Planned Parenthood, Indivisible, the group that first began by issuing a manual for progressives, and of course the ACLU. The unexpected donations have created a problem. While welcomed, the new generosity has ushered the kind of questions and issues expected when one suddenly finds oneself flush with money and volunteers. What to do with this unexpected money and with all these people? The organizations involved are required to made big adjustments, some more than others, in order to perhaps meet the expectations of new donors, to decide how to spend the funds, when and how to use new volunteers, how to keep people giving or volunteering, how to reorder priorities to accommodate new resources. National organizations are better equipped than local or state ones, they may have better staffs and organization to handle the influx.
Charity Navigator, a watchdog group, calls this rage giving. But whether or not it was given out of passion for a cause, it nevertheless says something worth noting. People are willing to fight for what they believe is right. We saw it with the Tea Party, with the Occupy Wall Street movement, yet in this case, it seems to go further. It involves backing your beliefs and your values with time and money. It’s the kind of giving, stance and action which create social change and which says something about human nature. There are many who of course see this in political terms, but the real value of this phenomenon goes beyond politics.
Famine And Its Consequences
Some 20 million people from 4 countries, Yemen, South Sudan, Somalia and Northern Nigeria are undergoing famine conditions. The UN and food aid organizations ‘s definition of famine is when more than 30% of children under age 5 suffer from acute malnutrition and the mortality rate is 2 or more death for each 10,000 people each day. The number of people is the highest since the founding of the UN in 1945 right after WWII. The UN under secretary-general for humanitarian affairs Stephen O’Brien, describes that many will simply starve to death, or Continue reading “Famine And Its Consequences”