My heart cries out

[stef4jesus]

Only a few hours ago was I complaining to a friend at lunch about how crappy my morning and previous evening had been. They guy I had a crush on rejected me, I had to get up to write a paper this morning, I had printer problems, was 25 min. late to class, got a B on a paper I worked really hard on, and didn't get to take a shower or have breakfast

Comments

[sitnah7]

I've heard it said that human misery is like a gas in chemistry: no matter how small the amount you have in a given container, it always spreads out to completely fill the container up. Not sure if that is always the case, but it seems to have at least some truth to it.

North Korea does illustrate a useful point very well: the material well-being of a society is all a function of how that society goes about distributing its resources. South Korea has no major inherit advantages over North Korea in terms of resource endowment, geography, etc. Yet South Korea is very prosperous, very modern, etc. and North Korea starves. Why? North Korea has a terrible distribution system compounded with a government that is so prone toward human rights abuses and aggressive behavior (with regard to its ongoing acquistion of nukes and ballistic missile tech) that the rest of the world can not in good conscience trade with it and thus support that regime and its goals/possible goals (like, oh, say, the conquest/total destruction of South Korea). It's not like there is not enough food in the world to feed North Korea-- there's enough that we are willing to give the food to them, free, if they would just take it and use it right. It's all about distribution.
So, I guess my point is that we should not feel guilty that we eat 3 meals a day when other people eat none-- there is enough food for them to eat fine as well, the issue is that they aren't getting due to faulty systems in their society/state. Where we should feel guilty, however, is if we don't know/don't care about these sorts of problems. These things should bother us, they should enrage us and move us and make us want to change things. Cause, if starvation and poverty and suffering doesn't move us, what will? Apathy, not gluttonous hording, is the great moral disease of America with regard to world poverty.

So, from my view, any type of aid programs to North Korea (and other countries in similar situations) is a great stop gap measure, but ultimately they're just that: stop gaps. Long term solutions come from changing the system in North Korea. To that end, I see raising awareness among the general public of how ridiculously terrible things are there is a good step in the right direction.

[stef4jesus]

fully agreed