I did that?
Went to see the Interperter last night at the great Kennedy School. Now my brain is twisted up on some childhood memory desire to help african refugees in some third world country how can I be a good world contributer type bullshit. Wow this work no sleep stuff can really have an affect after a bit. I'm gonna survive this day on candy, soda, and lasagne. mmmmm. But really, I do truely believe that we (each and every one of us) need to leave the world in either as good of, or better condition than when we arrived on it. I just can't exactly figure out how. Ilona said some stuff about me being part of a strong community and being honorable and an example and all that kind of stuff. But, I want to feel like I did something...something really good. A solid shining pillar that I can point to and say "I did that."
posted by Daniel @ 6:34 AM
1 Comments:
there was a good article in 'der spiegel' a few weeks ago about how a number of african economists were getting really fed up with bono and all the "aid" from europe and america - all the clothes we send with the pretext of 'helping' puts the local cotton and textiles industries out of business, the aid food gets dumped at below market prices so that it doesn't spoil and puts local farmers out of business, and the enourmous sums of cash for development projects become the only vibrant (if false) economic activity, and of course this creates piles of beaurocrats and few actual self-supporting markets. the aid agencies become themselves reliant on the (over) reporting of how terrible the situation is, and not reliant on the success of their "projects". more, they were of the opinion that it's even worse than having huge multinational corporations come and open sweatshops, because at least sweatshops support a variety of periphery businesses and are subject to "market forces" (leading to, over time, education, improvement of conditions, civil institutions, etc..)
all of that, not to say i disagree, absolutely we should leave the world a better place. i mean, what do i mean, that being a part of a strong community isn't such a bad way to do that, at least you have some control about how your contribution is managed - that it doesn't end up supporting some homocidal maniac dictator manipulating the relief system; when you could have put the same resources (time, money, energy) into helping the kid down the block learn to draw (or whatever honks your horn).
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