While I think it's important to reflect on the problems in other countries, sometimes I think people pay attention to other countries to the detriment of the problems in America already. There's millions of people without homes, squatting in homes with out water, electricity, or sewage, there's people living in poorly maintained homes. There's crumbling or inadequate infrastructure as well. A city of 20,000 near me is going to be building it's first grocery store in nearly 20 years since the last one went out of business. Think about what it means if you have to take a bus all the way out of town to buy your groceries. With the exception of around thanksgiving and christmas when everyone is donating food, food pantries run out of food all the time. I know several people who live in tents and my brother's friend has something like 12 people living in his tiny house. You could donate enough money to pay for 100 mosquito nets to ship over to Africa, or you could bring 10 people out of poverty and get them working again and the contribution to the economy would be enough to buy thousands of mosquito nets. Maybe one of those people would be a great inventor and come up with a new way to purify water for really cheap, or another would become an entrepreneur and build a mosquito net factory in Africa, killing three birds with one stone (employment, infrastructure, and malaria).
Of course, you shouldn't ignore the problems elsewhere in the world, preferably you should contribute to both. My point is that you shouldn't let the fact that billions of people live in poor conditions blind you to the millions of people living in hardly better conditions here. America isn't a wonderland of freedom and strip malls for everyone, for some people it's actually a pretty stuffty place.
I agree wholeheartedly...
Well I can't say much about capitalism or socialism because I don't know much about them but I've always felt that it's probably possible to have a mostly fed and housed population regardless of the economic or political system. I think a lot of the blame falls on local politicians being notoriously corrupt (people complaining about corruption in the federal government have obviously never picked up a local paper), a lack of oversight and transparency in government, and congress having no balls. I think that nearly all of the examples of socialism you can point out in the world probably aren't shining utopias of happy fully employed educated people with food to eat. I think that the fight against poverty probably can't be won by
any government, and the last 50 years proves it. It can only be minimized by getting motivated people out volunteering and helping out, but even temporary or partial relief, or getting 5% (that's still 2.1 million people) of the people in poverty out of it is worth fighting for. You could fill the entire states of California and Florida with all the people in poverty, so there's plenty of work to do.
