I first want to say that I give a lot of credit to volunteers who travel around the world helping 3rd world countries with their HIV problems, and their lack of clean water and food. The same compliment goes to those in the Peace Corps or Americorps, whatever they happened to be called today.
Thank You!
However, for an industrialized nation, such as the United States, to have any form of HIV problems, any water or hunger problem is ridiculous. In addition to that the regions that were hit by the last hurricane 6 months ago have yet to be rebuilt.
Volunteerism is an admirable trait. But, with the same problems existing in our own home country, that are being treated in 3rd world countries it would seem to me that the energy of volunteerism would be better used here in our own country.
The problem here is that we expect that the government is responsible to take care of all these problems. A similar standard is not applied to the rest of the world, oddly enough, when we see disasters in their countries. An argument can be made that those people have corrupt governments who care little for their citizens.
If not for a couple of pieces of old, dried paper written in 1775 so would go the US.
People honestly don’t know or refuse to believe just how close the United States is to becoming a 3rd world country. We have a very small industrial base.
Our dept load to other countries is $8,261,371,110,075.92 as of today.
Our largest export is fast food. And those are owned by people in those countries.
HIV is rampant here, the drug trade is huge, the homeless rate is growing daily as soldiers return from Iraq, poisoned by Depleted Uranium Munitions, or minds gone from seeing innocents being killed. Seniors are forgoing their med’s to keep their houses and have money to pay for heat, and food. Many shoplift and eat their pets food to stay alive.
People, this isn’t the life we were promised.
The government can’t or won’t help.
Give the time that you would give to other countries to your own first. Helping others for the reason that it will keep the problems from coming here, is the social equivalent to George Bush saying that we need to take the war to the terrorists, so that they don’t come here. And we know how well that’s working so far.