reach out and touch- updated for Live8. by risa
In the book of Chinese parables I was given so long ago I only remember it always being there,
there is one wide, red page where Panda bears sit around a table in heaven.
They help each other eat, laughing casually, with 3 foot long chopsticks.
While the panda bears in hell, sitting around the same table, with the same tools,
make a mess and go hungry, all trying to feed themselves.
This is an old story, and still it speaks a strange kind of contemporary truth about the ways we can use technology- about the networks that get built when we reach out with our long tools. I picture each open source program with its lines of open code stretching out to offer what they’ve got. (like Schooltool, or Care2x) And then I look at something like today’s amazing Live8 and our new declaration, as Will Smith said, of Interdependance; and I get all teary (ok, Brian Adams, I know, tears are not enough) and I think: this is an idea that we’ve been working on for a long time. Since the pandas fed each other with chopsticks. We keep saying it to remind each other, and especially those few men who are resposible for representing our desires and best interests on the world stage, that things are better when the system we all have to play in is fair. http://www.live8live.com
Yesterday I had a conversation with two friends about hunger. About how sometimes you can get to the point where you forget you are hungry, and sometimes it’s all you can think about. And Linda said that when she’s hungry the intensity of world conflict makes sense because she thinks about it as the obvious product of so many people starving. Once, when I was younger someone pointed out to me the cycle that might be started by growing up hungry, even here in Canada where kids come to school without lunch and then try to pay attention in class, and find they can’t remember things, and that they’re temper is short and their world seems bleak. That they might fight or fail tests or feel unloveable and desperate, and that that could take a weakened body down a dark road. But I had never concretely pictured the dark movements in history, the violent waves, in relation to all the individual experiences of empty belly.
We can and do do things besides feeling guilty and useless in the face of the reality of this. At http://www.unicef.org/ for example.
If you’d like to say something more detailed to PM Paul Martin then then petition at Live8 has room for, here is a link to his official contact info including email address: http://pm.gc.ca/eng/contact.asp.
If you’d like, you can mention how Russia has already stepped up: Russia forgives debt: Globe and Mail.
Risa Dickens
March 2nd, 2005 at 8:31 am
um, yeah, i just fixed this- the pandas, as you may have guessed, were not trying to feel themselves. little typo there, sorry.
July 2nd, 2005 at 9:33 pm
From the live 8 website. http://www.live8.com: I think the first sentence is particularly interesting. It’s intense to realize that privatization has been a requirement for debt relief. For many people, those for example who believe passionately in free heath care, this whould be an unexacceptable condition, and you’d be torn up between a rock and hard place:
“Poor countries should no longer have to privatise basic services or liberalise their economies as a condition for getting the debt relief they so desperately need.
Debt Relief Works!
In Benin, 54% of the money saved through debt relief has been spent on health including rural primary health care and HIV programmes.
In Tanzania, debt relief enabled the government to abolish primary school fees, leading to a 66% increase in attendance.
After Mozambique was granted debt relief, it was able to offer all children free immunisation.
In Uganda, debt relief led to 2.2 million people gaining access to clean water.”
July 4th, 2005 at 9:01 am
“It was Blair who is largely credited with having pushed through a G8 debt relief package worth about $40-billion in favour of the world’s most impoverished countries, most of them in Africa, in June.
The British prime minister, who also hopes to double aid to the continent, to $50-billion, by 2010 wants the Gleneagles summit, which runs from July 6 to 8, to be a pivotal moment in the fight to alleviate African poverty.
“The G8 has to understand that a developed Africa can serve its own interests, contributes to world peace; means a larger market for western industrialists and limits the HIV epidemic”, said Kouassi, pointing out that Western powers “do not always play fair” and accusing them of continuing outdated policies worthy of another century, notably in the field of cotton.
African nations accuse developed countries, and notably the United States, of contravening World Trade Organisation rules and continuing subventions to their own cotton producers, a policy that handicaps African producers.
“We’re tired of the image of Africa as a beggar. Development aid is the way for the West to give back to Africa what it took from us,” said Elisabeth Tankeu, AU Comissionner for Trade and Industry.
“African youth is desperate and has nothing to hope for. Our G8 partners should help us manage and develop our resources rather than pushing us towards despair”, she argued, citing the risk that despair could prove a breeding ground for anti-western extremism.”
http://www.mg.co.za/articlepage.aspx?area=/breaking_news/breaking_news__africa/&articleid=244456