The Sunday Oneonta Star has a mini-page with stories for children. Yesterday, there was an article about how the United Nations has developed Millenial Development Goals. "Every day, 16,000 children die from hunger-related causes -- that's one child every five seconds."
189 countries have signed on to help prevent this.
Where are the countries where children are starving to death? In this country, the opposite appears to be happening. Starving to death would probably be worse than dying from obesity. Twinkies are fun to stuff. But think that every five seconds, another child starves to death.
Let them eat Twinkies! We have plenty. (Our kids don't need them. More than half of the kids in New York City are obese.)
Arrangements are being made so that half of the starving children will not starve. Soon, if the Millenial Development Goals are met, a child will starve to death only every ten seconds.
But what about the increased population? Will that mean in a certain number of years there will be increased levels of starvation, so that then twenty children will starve to death every second?
In Ghana, a lunch program at school had helped to stop much of the starvation in that country, the article said. The article didn't say where the children were starving to death.
No one is starving to death in the USA. And probably nowhere in Europe. And probably nowhere in South or Central America or the Caribbean (not sure about Haiti). In Asia, I think some people probably starve to death in North Korea, and in Myanmar (centralized planning creates famines).
In Africa, I bet, is where the great majority of the starving occurs (due to disruption of law, anarchy, and lack of grocery stores?). No starving in Ghana. Ghana's food delivery system is working. But in Somalia, in Eritrea? In Zimbabwe, again, due to centralized planning, you have a massive famine.
For the centrally-planned economies it's hard to penetrate places like Myanmar or North Korea or Zimbabwe in order to deliver food. With a sophisticated air defense for the first two, it would be hard even to do a food drop. But for places like Somalia and the southern Sudan, why not just drop Twinkies on them? Is that where starving is taking place? Would Twinkies be the best answer? If one hit you on the head, it wouldn't hurt much, and children would like them, especially the inside.
When you imagine a child that you actually know starving to death, the pain is unbearable. The almost mechanized horror of a child starving to death every five seconds creates an anaesthetized sensation, almost comic in its bad taste. And yet, it happens. Where? What's the solution? Can Lutheran Surrealism and Lutheran Surrealists inch us toward a solution?
14 comments:
I was contemplating this very thing the other day. I've been reading a book called "Nothing to Envy," a book about North Korean defectors.
One woman, called Mrs. Song in the book, endured years of starvation along with millions of her countrymen. She sold everything in her house to try to purchase meal made out of cornhusks and cobs--even kernels of dried corn being out of her reach. She ground up pine bark to make into porrige.
Part of her daily duties at the garment factory where she worked (which never had electricity, so never produced any garments) was to pick through animal excrement to find undigested grains.
Sailors evaporated bilge water on top of their ships, complete with rat carcasses, to see if they could find kernels of corn.
Mrs. Song's mother in law died, a year later her 23 year old son died, a year later her 50 year old husband died, all from starvation.
She defected in 1999 with her eldest daughter who became a hostess at a karaoke bar in S. Korea.
Mrs. Song was a true believer. She bowed every morning to the portraits in her living room of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jung Il. She believed the imperialist Americans were deliberately sabotaging North Korean food supplies.
That was until she was pursuaded to meet her daughter Oak-hee in China to get back some money she had loaned to her daughter. Of course, this was just Oak-hee's pretext to get her mother out of North Korea. The people Mrs. Song was staying with deprogrammed her through gradual contact with South Korean media, foods, and conveniences.
Mrs. Song remembers being woken up one morning in this Chinese apartment by the sound of an electric rice cooker dinging. That was what made her decide to go to South Korea.
People got used to seeing children frozen to death in the streets, elderly people sleeping on the snowy ground near the train station. It became part of life. Children were often the last people left of a family, their parents and grandparents giving up their portion to keep them alive. There are millions of orphans in North Korea.
It's tragically ironic that it was the "true believers" who so often died first--the people who refused to participate in the black market because it would erode the socialist principles they were brought up with.
It's so sad.
I thought of this as I made some minute rice on the stove. It cost me a couple of pennies. In Chongjin at the height of the famine in N. Korea, it would have cost three months pay.
Emmy, it's wonderful to read your review of this book. I looked it up on Amazon.com. It's about 7,000 and isn't officially published for another couple of weeks (Sept. 21, 2010).
I hope that the book even opens the eyes of the many leftists like Obama who continually attempt to turn America into a planned economy, in which HE decides who makes what, and how much each person gets, who can believe in what religion, and in which the government provides everything from birth to death.
It always results in the same disaster.
Far better to allow and encourage individual initiative, and not try to take it away, in order to establish a cult of gratitude. Obama is tryng to do this with the Mexican-americans, and it's already been done with far too many African-Americans. What we need is to encourage entreprenurial get-up and go on the part of each person, not a creepy dictatorship in which some creep gives us stuff in exchange for votes.
The most backward nations on earth are the centrally planned ones, in which a cult leader like Kim Jong-Il or Mugabe, or others, ruin everything for the rest of their people, while you have to praise them and thank them all day long.
I can't wait until Obama is out.
Eight more weeks and we should see the beginning of a turn-around.
Kirby, you continually present a false choice between a hard-right America and North Korea...
Obviousy, the type of socialism that causes the North Korean level of famine is not anywhere on the scale of Western countries - of which we are the furthest right...
Also, you say lots of things about what Obama wants to do/has done that aren't true. It's weird when you do that.
Obama isn't Kim Jong-Il, but my question is: would he like to be?
And my answer is: that's his natural tendency, or so it appears to me.
I grant that most politicians would prefer a dictatorship.
This whole hassle of having to get reelected every few years, and term limits, is a real bother to all of them.
I think inside of every professional politicians is a Kim Jong-Il that only wishes that they could get a lifetime appointment and be able to do everything they want to do without this problem of votes.
Very few would turn down a crown and a scepter if it were offered. You know Michelle would love it.
Apparently Somalia is doing better without a government to steal and cause disruption than when it has a government and compared to some of its negihbors
http://www.peterleeson.com/Better_Off_Stateless.pdf
Why should Omaba be Kim Jong Il rather than Hans-Adam II?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans-Adam_II,_Prince_of_Liechtenstein
All who seek power are not alike.
Kim Jong Il and Hans Adam II both received their power through inheritance.
Obama didn't.
But I think he's closer to K-J Il, because he's more of a socialist.
Plus, Hans Adam II is very interested in collecting art.
Obama's interests are not clear.
I really have no idea who BO is aside from the few things that Michelle has said about him (he throws his socks around, and smells awful in the morning).
I don't know what he eats, what he thinks about, whether or not he reads poetry, what shows he prefers on TV.
He has a pretty good jump shot, and he sat in a church for twenty years without apparently absorbing anything.
Kim Jung Il has a stronger and clearer personality: Kim likes flare pants, and Bond films.
Also, like Kim, Obama has a nuclear arsenal at his disposal, and his country has fought in both world wars.
It's fun of you to bring up Liechtenstein! Only five countries are smaller than Liechtenstein! I love tiny countries!
Never forget Tannu Tuva! There is also Macau, San Marino, and Monaco.
Actually, I don't know if Korea fought in WWI.
Apparently, N. Korea received a subsidy from the Soviet Union, and when the S. Union collapsed in the early 90s, so did the N. Korea economy.
N. Korean soccer team wasn't too bad in this summer's World Cup. What's the story on that?
Has Obama ever seen a soccer game? Would he know the rules?
Bush even Said that it would be 'easier' if he were a dictator...
Some on the left got stupid and tried to use this against him - it was an honest statement made somewhat jokingly - but you're doing the same thing against Obama, even though he Hasn't made a wanna-be-a-dictator gaffe like Bush did.
Obama is no more dictatorial than any other president in recent memory... He has ideas and wants them enacted, and this makes him a dictator? That's like saying a few warrantless wiretaps made Bush a fascist.
Don't be stupid.
I believe the Korean peninsula was conquered by Japan in 1910, and remained under their control until after WW2.
Scott Sumner has been advocating the advantages of small countries (they have smarter governments, more public cohesion), and suggested turning the US into something like the EU.
http://www.themoneyillusion.com/?p=1980
I think Upstate NY should start the ball rolling and succeed.
a solution
let me offer a solution
twinkies is not bad
twinkies is good
good for business
good for transport
good for durability
theyir radioactive so the shelf life is enormous like
my solution consists of ending the use of the birth control pill and stopping abortion
i know this sounds radical but just hear me out
in my equation it boils down to love
and love is at stake here
i don't know how things are in the rest of the world but in america we have all but destroyed the concept of home and that's largely because it is deemed unnecessary and it is unnecessary because women or many women are refusing to have children now if all of those wombwomb would be momma people would just have some children then they the children would stand a good chance of becoming missionaries and poets with most likely with huge amounts of knowedge they would be kind hearted medical people many of them and they would go to the poor places and solve all the food and illness problems
and probably with good fresh garden and farm food and not your damned twinkie fix for the fox world blue and pink twinkies falling from huge C-27z like bombs like radioactive cupcakes like bouncing smushy sweet plastic food in a plastic wrapper
man
the more i think of it
the more i think
you're sort of sick
no
really very sick
twinkies
anyway more real sex
more passionate baby making sex
that will be the answer
no hold outs no going backs
just healthy normal sperm meets the ovum grinding babymaking sex will solve the worlds' health problems
when we get the sex thing under some civilized christian control
then the world might have a chance to turn around
otherwise
i think we just might be goners
before the midmillenium
if all the would be babies that have been aborted had learned to read poetry and play bach on the piano the world would be at peace
twinkies must be to food
what pornography is to literature
is it that man's inhumanity to man simply becomes more devious?
jh
I meant to write that UNY ought to secede, though ultimately in order to become more successful.
I got what you meant, and thought you were pulling a Palin.
Too bad the word "palindrome" has already been taken by a phrase that spells the same forwards and backwards.
It ought to be a portmanteau word, like your usage of succeed to mean both secede and its regular meaning.
Palin had "refudiate," which I thought was just sheer genius.
Well, JH, if you prefer TastyCakes, so be it.
Recently Carter had to go to N. Korea to get a do-gooder out of there. If there were more, Carter would just have to stay on the plane, doing RTs, and probably building up a lot of frequent flier miles.
Another American do-gooder went to Myanmar and got into trouble. Someone had to bail him out, too.
Tastycakes, Oreos, Candy Corn, we could just load up these abomination and rocket them about the globe as a kind of sugary diplomacy based on Marie Antoinette's statement, "Let them eat cake!" This has always seemed to me to be sound policy.
Children children don't you know
There should be a new poetry contest starting with that line, but we have to wait until the other one's over.
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