Worrying About Society
Next Entries »Terrorism
Thursday, July 7th, 2005Yesterday London was awarded the 2012 Olympics.
Today terrorism has killed and injured hundreds of innocent people and brought London to a standstill.
We can only watch and wait for news.
Subscribe Via Email OR
Subscribe Via RSS
OR
Comments Off
Posted in Worrying About Society, In The News
Every three seconds a child dies
Friday, July 1st, 2005As we go about our daily business most of us give no thought to what is going on every day in the poorest parts of the world. I mean, we all have enough problems of our own, right? But did you know 50,000 people a day die from poverty? Worldwide, a woman dies every minute from complications associated with having a baby; 99% of these deaths are in the developing world. Every three seconds a child dies through preventable diseases.
Every three seconds.
One billion people, one in six of the world’s population, live on less than $1 a day.
I have been trying to imagine what my daily life would be like if I had to live on that kind of money.
At the same time the poorest countries in the world routinely spend more on debt repayments than they do on health. In 2002 low-income countries paid out $39 billion in debt repayments to rich country creditors - the equivalent of $100 million every day. In that same year, despite the billions living in poverty, the millions out of school, and the thousands dying daily, they received only $17bn billion in grant aid.
There is much emphasis on what the G8 summit might achieve this week in making poverty history. But the media attention seems to be overlooking the fact that the G8’s policies are at the core of the world’s problems. And there is a risk that those organising Live8 are falling into line with the Government’s agenda and diluting the message, primarily on the issue of trade justice, where change could really end poverty.
There are three critical and inextricably linked areas where policy change is needed:
- trade justice;
- stop forced liberalisation through the World Trade Organisation, through economic partnership agreements and through the World Bank and IMF.
- end export dumping
- stop big business profiting and the expense of people and the environment.
- drop the debt, without strings;
- although the G8 countries recently cancelled £22 billion of debt for 18 poor but well-governed countries it was tied to cuts in aid and was conditional on Western companies having unlimited access to the markets of those countries. They need protectionism to develop their own economies.
- more and better aid
Joined-up policies that address the social, economic, security and governance needs of populations living in fragile or conflict-affected regions are needed. At present, misplaced development assistance, inequitable trade and foreign investment, irresponsible arms sales and disenfranchisement are feeding conflict and instability.
So please think of something you can do to make a difference, to raise awareness. Go to makepovertyhistory.org and read the booklet.
This is our chance to try and make a difference. Even if it means just one less baby dying.
Subscribe Via Email OR
Subscribe Via RSS
OR
Comments Off
Posted in Worrying About Society
Poverty and The Girl in the Cafe
Sunday, June 26th, 2005Last night I watched “The Girl in the Cafe” on the BBC, a drama about poverty which combined a typical Richard Curtis (screenwriter of the films Four Weddings, Notting Hill, Bridget Jones’s Diary and Love Actually) love story with the efforts of Britain’s chancellor and prime minister to persuade the other G8 nations to agree to eliminate poverty. It was cleverly done, getting the message across about how desperate poverty is and how relatively simple it is for the western world to reduce it with new agreements on trade, aid and debt. It was also very trite, relying on a fantasy storyline of a young woman, an outsider invited to the G8 summit, telling the world leaders why they should stop poverty.
But then isn’t Sir Bob Geldof doing just that? Telling us to tell world leaders why they should make poverty history? So perhaps the storyline wasn’t so far-fetched after all, although it felt like it watching it. I have a huge amount of respect for Bob Geldof; I’m sure he bugs a lot of people, particularly the politicians he is seeking to influence, but he has stood up and been counted and the work he has undertaken and the results he has achieved have improved the lives of millions of poor people. He has also had a career as a musician and brought up four children, mostly on his own. I don’t imagine that on his deathbed he will be questioning what he has managed to achieve with his life.
Subscribe Via Email OR
Subscribe Via RSS
OR
No Comments »
Posted in Worrying About Society
Things that go bump in the night
Friday, February 25th, 2005I have never been very good at being ‘home alone’. Which is all the more ironic as I married a man who is effectively a travelling salesman. No wait. He is categorically NOT a travelling salesman (is that what I am supposed to say, sweetie?). He is something very important and he just happens to travel as well. Yes, that’s right.
Anyway, he is away pretty much every week.
Which is also why I moan a lot about having to raise my children, because most of the time I feel like I am doing it alone.
I’ve always been a bit spooked at night. If I hear any noise that can’t be explained, I have to get up to investigate even though it is invariably one of the dogs or a toy falling off a precarious perch. And if I’m on my own, I’m completely paranoid. As a teenager we lived in a large, rambling old house which creaked and groaned like an old man’s knees. If my parents were away overnight I would stay up all night in the kitchen with the lights and music on really low to stop an intruder. INSTEAD OF HAVING WILD PARTIES. What was I thinking?
So, bearing in mind that I have been here only a couple of weeks, we are having lunch today when I think I should put the heating on as it is cold here at the moment. So cold that I’ve been thinking about breaking out my thermal vests, I’m THAT sexy. When I walk to the front door, I see a man peering through the door as if the doorbell hadn’t been answered and he was just kind of checking to see that no-one was home. We made eye contact as only you can through squiggly glass and assuming I hadn’t heard the doorbell (which I absolutely would of course, when having lunch with two screaming, bratty toddlers) I went to answer the door.
As soon as he saw me, he ran. Well actually he walked in that very fast way so that you look like you are walking when actually you are running. It absolutely doesn’t draw any attention to yourself. No sirree. Ever the concerned, involved citizen I made a mental note of his physical description and resumed lunch.
While putting out the refuse this afternoon, an extremely dodgy looking man came up our driveway. My first thought was this place is like a village for crime rejects, but he turned out to be a plain clothes policeman. A neighbour down the lane by our house was burgled this morning and he was asking if we had seen anything suspicious. Well, yes I had. Feeling very proud of myself I gave the detailed description of the man who had been at our door.
He won’t be caught of course. Burglars never are. Actually that’s not quite true. We were burgled at a previous house when we popped out for twenty minutes to the grocery store. Because the house was so well protected, the burglar had only managed to get in through a tiny pane of glass in the front door. Finding no alternative escape route once he was in the house either, he could only take what would fit back through the tiny pane of glass. I took some solace and even a slight amount of pleasure in this thought. All my large music equipment was safe. He must have been cursing when he realised there was such a huge amount of valuable stuff that he couldn’t take. All the same he managed a fair old swoop and despite detailed descriptions and serial numbers of the items he did take, they were never seen again. We even went down to the local (legal) cash-for-second-hand-items shop, fully expecting to see half the contents of our house there. Months passed and then out of the blue we had a letter from the Local Constabulary informing us that the man had been sent down for a few years. He had confessed to burgling our house and one in two of every other building in our street (not all at the same time either) in return for a more lenient jail sentence. Wait. So he confesses to more crimes and gets less time in jail? You gotta love English law. Where the hell is the sense in that? So in the end, they sort of caught him for our burglary, but if he hadn’t been trying to strike a deal they wouldn’t have. And by that time my need for justice, and dare I say it, revenge, was long gone. I was denied even the pleasure of that. Pah.
So now I am home alone with two small children and two pathetic dogs that would roll over on their backs for a burglar if he offered to tickle their tummies, when a man has been earlier eyeing up our property, potentially as a burglary target.
And so tonight, when I so need some quality sleep, I shan’t be sleeping at all.
Subscribe Via Email OR
Subscribe Via RSS
OR
Comments Off
Posted in Worrying About Society
Next Entries »