Living in the future

[andrewducker]

Remember all those futuristic films from the 70s and 80s where the elite live in towering cities of glass and steel surrounded by incredible computers and magic technology, while out in the wastelands live the barbarian hordes, trying to eke a living from the desert sands while the city-dwellers looked down upon and generally ignored them?

Suddenly I've realised that that wasn't the future at all.





I'm living in a largely utopian _today_, while others are living in a dystopian hell.

I give, but I don't really think I give enough. Once my debts are down to a more controlled level (soon) I'll be upping my charitable donations.

Comments

[derumi.livejournal.com]

Quite true, unfortunately. And there are places where you can find both scenes in the same country.

[weetanya.livejournal.com]

i question the photographer in image 2.

i mean really: take a picture of that agony? i'd be running to rescue the little human.

[andrewducker]

I think the little human might actually be dead in that picture.

And if not, there's little you can do but scoop them up and carry them past the dozens of little humans in identical situations and take them to where thousands of identical humans are awaiting a shipment of aid that is unlikely to do any good.

The photo, on the other hand, might inspire people to actually do something/send money, and in the long run could save a lot more money.

It's heart-rending though.

[derumi.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, that shipment of aid is usually being held up and distributed amongs non-scrawny humans armed with guns.

[sibelian.livejournal.com]

Well, yes, but remember that some photographers are quite mad.

Of note from my photography course was a photo of some Vietnamese entitled: "People about to be shot." The word-play on shot was only figured out later on, they had been rounded up by soldiers and were, indeed, about to be shot before the photographer (I think it was Don McLean) asked the soldiers to wait a bit so he could take a picture. Which they did. And he took the picture. And then they were shot. It's things like that that make me think there's something fundamentally wrong with the human species.

[red-cloud.livejournal.com]

Don McCullin?

[sibelian.livejournal.com]

Hah! :-) silly me, that'll be the chappie. If it WAS him, at any rate.

[dragonscholar.livejournal.com]

I've been having the same sensation lately. I go to a mall to get a DVD or a computer game, and I look at ALL THIS STUFF and this bright shiny building I take for granted.

Then I look at the world and realize how lucky I am.

[heron61.livejournal.com]

You are quite correct. However, I do not give to charities that aid humans in the 3rd world. From everything that I've read, many of those nations have unsustainable populations. For example, the last detailed info I heard about India (a decade ago when I was in grad school) approximately 1/3 of the nation was middle class (by first world standard), 1/3 was much like the first world poor, and 1/3 lived in desperate poverty of a level that those of us in the first world have trouble understanding. The response of the Indian government is to spend most of their aid on the middle 3rd, this is a hard decision, but one that I understand. They simply lack the resources to support their entire population. Until we manage to both remove scarcity on a global level and get global population growth under control, there will continue to be nations that are above their carrying capacity. This is tragic, but there is nothing to be done unless we wish to wreck the planet. My advice is to send your money to organizations supporting population control and also to donate to charities helping people in the first world. Then again, I'm also a fairly radical environmentalist who regards species survival as at least as important as the lives of individual humans.

[themongkey.livejournal.com]

That's a little harsh. We all live on the same planet. I forget the exact percentages, but it's pretty obvious that a small reduction in consumption and living standards for a few at the top would make the difference between life and death for vast numbers at the bottom.

[andrewducker]

Most of the countries in the worse situations aren't there because of natural disasters, but because one group of people are killing another group of people and preventing the farmers from getting to fields they could be farming (or killing them outrights).

There _are_ famines due to sheer over-population, but we have the food to feed the whole planet right now, if we actually had the will.

[heron61.livejournal.com]

There _are_ famines due to sheer over-population, but we have the food to feed the whole planet right now, if we actually had the will.

True, but shipping large amounts of food all across the world is not any form of long-term solution and in many of these places the famines are not caused by a single crop failure, they are caused by ruined land or land that is incapable of supporting anywhere near the amount of humans that live in the area.

[andrewducker]

I'm not talking about shipping food long distance on a long term basis - Sudan isn't suffering a famine because of rain problems, but because of civil war. It could feed itself just fine, if one group of people wasn't attempting to destroy anothe group of people.