In the United States, farmers grow enough grain to feed the world’s population many times over. If there were no increase in your taxes, would you support the government using tax dollars to buy grain and the distribution channels necessary to keep the earth’s population fed at all times? This could be done easily by making cuts in other areas.
Why is it that when we consider such questions we ask everybody but the people whose lives we think are at stake?
Here is a source that powerfully gives their perspective:
Grassroots Post-Modernism: Remaking the Soil of Cultures, by Gustavo Esteva and Madhu Suri Prakash. I believe that there is now a 2014 edition. I read the 1998 edition.
The thesis of
Grassroots Post-Modernism is basically this: a post-modern epic is unfolding at the grassroots among the world's oppressed majority (the people we in the West call the "Third World") and that this was evidenced by the First Intercontinental Encounter for Humanity and Against Neoliberalism.
Many in the world's oppressed majority, if the authors are correct, have during 500 years of being dominated by outsiders and having their history interrupted resisted the encroachment of expanding Western creations such as free markets and managed to maintain their lands and indigenous cultures. While we in the West talk about how fortunate we are to have our way of life, the world's majority has
only suffered from modernity. The people in the oppressed majority have, as the authors put it, waited for 500 years to resume their own history--their own way of life.
The ethnocentrism in the West is breathtaking. We assume as seamlessly as we take breaths and blink eyes that our own cultural patterns are operating on every square inch of the Earth and that everybody longs to have our way of life, our standard of living, etc. The way that we are so oblivious to human cultural variation is, again, breathtaking.
It is like it has never occurred to people that even if we could eliminate the "corrupt governments" that people have repeatedly talked about in this thread--or even if we could eliminate every obstacle imagined in this thread--it does not necessarily mean that our cultural patterns will be embraced in what we call the Third World or that the exportation of such cultural patterns will produce the outcomes that we envision. Just because people who want to export a square peg are intelligent, wealthy, powerful and have put men on the moon does not mean that a round hole will be receptive to a square peg and that a square peg will fit into that round hole.
Apparently we are not only so arrogant and ethnocentric that we think we can invade places like Iraq and transform them to our vision, we also think we can throw all of our disproportionate amount of resources into whatever pond we focus on, including global hunger, and the ripples will transform everything in their path. We think that the only thing stopping us from causing such wholesale transformation is that we have our priorities backwards, we lack compassion, we lack the will, etc.
And I have only touched on cultural variation. There is also geography. Like it was pointed out in one post, we are able to have the agricultural output that we have in the U.S. because of aquifers that, by every account I have heard, are going to dry up before long.
I think that if we really want to do what is right and what is good we will take a look in the mirror and resolve to end this ethnocentrism, narcissism and arrogance that makes us think that our way of life is destined to solve every problem everywhere on the globe, that makes us fail to see that the majority of people have overwhelmingly mostly suffered from our way of life, that makes us fail to see that civilizations collapse ecologically and that our civilization is not immune, and that makes us tone-deaf to the possibility (see
Grassroots Post-Modernism) that other people are already moving beyond our hegemony and are poised to transform the world in a way that would make our vision seem like faint background noise.
