Aiding Ourselves?

When I type ‘aid’ into the BBC news search, I find it interesting that it comes up with a number of stories about aiding companies or aiding sports teams. We are spending hundred of millions in order to keep up our precious capitalism (do not worry, I am not a socialist). We are giving aid to ourselves.

Imagine if we got rid of just one multimillion dollar corporation, and used the money to aid the rest of the world. Yes, thousands of people would lose their jobs, but we may be saving the lives of a thousand others. Imagine just getting rid of one huge corporation, one manufacturer who make things unbreakable in order for us to break them and have to buy new things (or a company that is already exploiting its employees), can change a lot.

This article from the BBC, talks about money that is being funded so that lil’ ol’ Darlington Football Club can be reestablished, which is 5 million pounds in debt. The article talks about how when each person buys a ticket, the money will go towards the club and its establishment. We in the west so eagerly feed our local communities because then they feed us with entertainment. We feed ourselves when we could feed the impoverished world.

That article came out this month, within the very same week that this article came out, addressing starvation issues in the prisons of Zimbabwe.

“Dozens of inmates in Zimbabwe die every day of starvation and disease.”

We could possibly help them in their plea for humanitarian aid needed for ‘food and clothing’, however we would all appear (including myself) to be too busy aiding ourselves with entertainment and additional merchandise.

A documentary was made about the conditions of the prisons in Zimbabwe. In the documentary prisoners describe how the sick and the healthy sleep side-by-side in unhygienic and overcrowded cells. These conditions seem to arguably reflect the conditions that the people were held in at a school during the Cambodian genocide, in which hardly anyone who went in survived. Things like this are happening all over the world. We give money to aid football teams, to help attention deprived sports stars, when other people are life threateningly food deprived.

I know that it is hard to truly feel the effects of what we are doing; it is hard for everyone to feel for the rest of the world because it simply doesn’t affect us, doesn’t apply to us. The western world (again, including me) finds it hard to deplete even the smallest bit of self consumption. After all, we are a consuming nation. We aim to fill our wants, when less developed nations merely seek fulfillment of their needs.

On the CNN website, when I type in ‘aid’, I find a number of different things. But what I found that was most alarming was that a story entitled ‘what you eat can improve your health, mind and appearance’ was sitting right next to a story entitled ‘Quake survivors: what about our future?’. This is the part where we ignore the question and say well, what about my hair?!