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Rastimmipitwax -> RE: What do you feel a nation's priority should be? (5/15/2010 9:57:25 PM)
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On the topic of a nation's priority, no nation in this day and age can ignore what goes on outside its borders anymore; however, there are a huge number of issues that each and every nation has to deal with within them as well. All of these have to be dealt with, or if not, the repercussions will have to be dealt with.
As for poverty in America, I can believe it is much like poverty in Canada, and that is something I can speak with some small amount of authority on. Though I have not, thankfully, lived in poverty I have spent a great deal of time among people who have lived with it and can tell quite a few stories.
Like the bottle man, who spent thirty years on the streets of a major urban centre, collecting bottles and cans and bringing them in to the recycling depot for the deposit money. He died with $90,000 in a bank account, into which he had put all of that money because he found his food and shelter without needing to use it.
Like the many people, generally but far from exclusively white males, who would not work if you handed them a good job and a home to live in, for as many reasons as there are individuals. More often than not, these are not drug addicts or alcoholics trying to escape from something in their past. I know, I have spoken to many of them at great length. These individuals, at least, have chosen this way of life, because they for whatever reason will not work for someone else (often called "the man"), but either do not possess the entrepreneurial nature to make a life such as you or I live, or simply consider that to be working for the government (just another aspect of "the man") to pay its taxes.
As with anything, the situation of poverty is a very subjective one. There are no teeming masses of humanity subsisting daily, or less frequently, on a meagre ration of rice or what have you the way millions in many parts of the world do, but there are certainly many living in circumstances few of us would consider acceptable for ourselves. It is all a matter of perspective. To improve the lives of a single homeless family in North America costs as much as improving the lives of an entire village in far too many places. Imagine what ten thousand dollars would do in either of these situations. Would you take a bowl of nourishing food from a child in some other nation, who has no opportunity to fend for his or herself, and give it to an American, who has so much opportunity to go out and find work? It may be unpleasant work that he or she doesn't want to do, it may be hard work, but it's far more than anything that child will ever have.
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