i considered blogging late, late sunday but thought about the previous post on the code pink book stop the next war now and figured i'd leave that as the front piece for monday. i don't care if you buy the book from buzzflash or from code pink or from powell's books or from your local bookstore or if you check it out at the library. but i do care that you know about this book and i hope that you will take the time to consider reading it.
this deals with methods and means other than the obvious bully boy "plan" of bomb the hell out of some 1. this is a conversation that ava, jess, ty, dona, jim (all of 3rd estate sunday review), c.i. (the common ills), folding star (a winding road), betty (thomas friedman is a great man), kat (kat's korner), gina, krista (gina & krista's round-robin) and i have been having and i can't believe that other people aren't having it as well. the mainstream media's not having the conversation, but people are having it. and we need to be having it. so please read the book or at least read up on it.
and here's something else to think about. the new york times has been addressing the increase in polio in the third world for the last two weeks. saturday they ran an article "health officials say gulf nations should give more to fight polio." the author was donald g. mcneil jr. and i want to note a part of the article here:
With polio surging rapidly through Muslim countries, public health officials trying to eradicate it are expressing frustration that wealthy Islamic nations contribute so little to the effort, despite repeated requests.
Fighting the disease has cost nearly $4 billion since the eradication campaign began in 1985, and the campaign is urgently trying to raise another $250 million to handle this year's new outbreaks, but the Persian Gulf states have given less than $3 million so far.
[. . .]
The largest donors to polio eradication are Rotary International, which has given more than $600 million since 1985, and the United States, which has given more than $500 million plus the use of staff and laboratory services from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Britain and Japan have given more than $250 million each, and the European Union, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands and the World Bank have given more than $100 million each. Other European countries, Russia, Australia, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the United Nations Foundation have been major donors.
before we all start feeling real proud of ourselves for being americans, let's think about how much we've spent on the occupation & invasion of iraq: $168,559,862,181
as i type this but it's still mounting. $500 million given over 20 years comes to 25 million each year. that's really not a great deal of money.
polio is like some diseases today (cancer, aids, etc.), we do have a vaccine for it. and we've had it for some time. and as betty's lunatic 'husband' thomas friedman would point out (rightly on this point) what happens in x affects a and b and c. so if people aren't outraged at the idea that a disease we thought we had stamped out continues to rage and harm women, men and children else where in the world, maybe they could think of their own self-interests and how an outbreak in x could affect other areas.
let's paint a picture of a past period:
In America in the 1950s, summertime was a time of fear and anxiety for many parents; this was the season when children by the thousands became infected with the crippling disease poliomyelitis, or polio. This burden of fear was lifted forever when it was announced that Dr. Jonas Salk had developed a vaccine against the disease. Salk became world-famous overnight, but his discovery was the result of many years of painstaking research.
need a celebrity face to care about the issue? joni mitchell, neil young and mia farrow all caught polio as children. joni mitchell has explained that the reason she's moved from acoustic guitar to a lighter, electrical 1 is because of the polio. any 1 who's hummed along with 'all i want' or any of her other guitar based classics, or has heard jimmy page rave on about mitchell's guitar playing realizes that although mitchell's adapted (and continues to create art), 'something's lost but something's gained in living every day' ('both sides now').
we, and i include myself in 'we,' have been so proud of ourselves and how we stamped out polio. but we didn't. we could. we could really invest in monies to stamp this out globally. but we haven't done that.
we're happy to bomb women, men and children. but we can only spare the equivalent of $20 million a year to stop polio. there's something wrong with that picture.
