Do The Freakin Math

Liberals and conservatives alike frequently rely on limited evidence, personal experience, religious beliefs or gut emotions to determine solutions for complex problems. From immigration to global warming - taxes to terrorism - or health care to free trade - analytical study is rare. Science based policy making isn’t the way of Washington. And the consequences are catastrophic. Change is urgently needed. Just do the freakin’ math.

Monday, September 27, 2010

How will our great grand children judge us?

I believe they will first judge us on our refusal to end the most horrific of all human experiences…the death of tens of thousands of children each day from easily preventable malnutrition and hunger related infectious diseases…in an era when so much, could be done for so many, for so little cost. Even today more than 40 years after we (the world and the US) committed to ending world hunger, 22,000 children still die every day. We (the US and the world) agreed to achieve the measurable, affordable and achievable year 2000 goals pledged at the 1990 World Summit for Children and then failed to make good on the promise. We again failed to meet a similar set of affordable goals set for 2025 (the Millennium Development Goals) that could have cut child deaths by 15,000 a day, full well knowing that achieving such goals would have made the world freer, safer and more prosperous for all.
Second, future generations will judge us as temporarily insane for not abandoning war as a means of solving differences between nations. A federation of nations using the global rule of law to address disagreements was virtually ignored because of an irrational fear of world government. It will be impossible for future generations to understand why we continued our mass worshiping of national sovereignty when it’s predictable consequence was continued genocide, war, hunger, terrorism, disease and environmental destruction.
Third, future generations will judge Americans harshly regarding our insistence on maintaining the global status quo of US supremacy when the universal ideal of inalienable human rights (the real power that created our nation) could have been our nation’s logical legacy to the world. Our nation’s persistent denial regarding the known benefits of global cooperation, the rule of law, the golden rule, and the cost saving aspect of problem prevention, will be mind numbing looking back.
Last, our nation’s collective political decision to wage war against a tactic will be seen as the most irrational means of maintaining a decades long addiction to burning a finite ancient resource. A polluting resource that helped fund our enemies and altered for worse a stable global climate that all humanity depended on.

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