Statistics are dangerous. They can either show you the severity of a situation, or reduce it to mere digits and decimals. Once in a while though, you come across statistics that are too meaningful to be ignored. Such was the case when I began reading poverty statistics on www.afaceaface.org.
The disproportion of the world’s wealth is staggering. Before I go any further, I have to say that I am not a socialist, although I have been accused of being one. I am not a communist either. I do believe in the freedom to make your own way in life, and that your hard work and perseverance should be the only factors that determine how successful you are. I understand that not everyone can be rich, and not everyone wants to be. I understand that there is no utopia, no fool-proof plan, no magic that can fix it all. Still, I can’t help but to want to do something.
Less than one percent of what was spent on weapons worldwide could have provided basic education for all children by the year 2000, but that did not happen. Not to mention the world’s richest 20% consume 76% of its resources. So what does all this mean? It means that all around the world priorities are completely backwards. While that rich 20% are of consuming a bunch of crap they really don’t need, millions of children are dying around the world because they lack basic human needs like clean water and sanitation.
My brain feels like it’s swimming in my scull as I read these statistics. Americans and Europeans spend nearly three times as much money on pet food every year as the entire world spends on education. Europeans spend nearly ten times as much on alcoholic beverages as the entire world spends to make sure that all women have reproductive healthcare.
I think a big part of this problem is that people in the western world egotistically view themselves as the pinnacle of civilization. According to our behavior, we think our way of life is the best way, the lack of water and sanitation around the world has no effect on us, and our pets are more important than uneducated, third-world children dying. In truth, rampant consumerism is completely unsustainable and it’s destroying the very earth we live on. American children are being caught in the tide of anti-intellectualism and our education system is failing miserably.
Perhaps instead of a war on terror or a war on drugs (both of which have made almost no measurable progress) maybe we should be fighting a war on ignorance, or a war for government accountability, or a war on greedy fat cats who abuse not only the capitalist system, but the environment and the American people. Maybe those kind of wars would actually yield some successes.
The time has come for people to stand together and say, enough is enough. People lived on this earth for thousands of years without all the crap we think we need today. We cannot go backward, but it has become apparent that we aren’t moving forward either. If we don’t start making changes on our own terms, the universe will respond to our oblivious decadence with destruction, like it has already done with so many civilizations before ours. It’s our call.
Link to statistics: http://www.afaceaface.org/blog/?p=1223
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