Blog Action Day 2008

Today is Blog Action Day. The purpose of this annual event is to focus blog discussions on a particular topic. This year's topic is poverty. I've been thinking all day what I could write about and still haven't come up with a "great" idea. Since this is a personal/family blog I thought I'd just give you some of my random thoughts on the topic. So here goes.

I've been what I consider poor. I've been unemployed and had very little money. What I haven't been is without options. I've never literally not known where my next meal would come from. Actually I don't think I've ever missed a meal except by choice. I'm a middle-class white American and I take a lot of things for granted. The right to a place to live, an education, health care, food - these are all things I don't consider a gift, but a right. However, there are millions of people in the world for whom these things would be a gift. I think that is obscene. One of the definitions of obscene is "abhorrent to morality or virtue." That people are forced to sleep on the ground with no food and no place to receive health care is abhorrent.

Unfortunately there isn't an easy solution. Millions of people writing blog posts about poverty is nice. It focuses attention for a day on an important topic. But for so many of us, especially those able to write & read blog posts, it's only an abstraction. Tomorrow we'll go back to our lives and forget there are people starving every minute. Hopefully some of us won't. Hopefully a few more people will contribute money or time to help change things. That isn't going to change the facts very much. People will still starve to death. I think there is something fundamentally wrong with a society that condones that.

And we are, by our inaction, condoning it. Karl Marx said, Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it. We are philosophizing in our blog posts. The point, however, is change. Perhaps a world-wide discussion can begin a process that will lead to some real change. There are thousands, probably millions, of things in this world that need changing. I think poverty should be at the top of the list.

Update - not really relevant to anything: I have 229 blogs in my Google Reader. I was disappointed at how few had a Blog Action Day post. I didn't count but a guess I'd say about 10.