T plus 5 (years).
Sure, the world is always changing. But it is seldom that so much change can be traced back to one day, one occurence. September 11, 2001 will be memorialized many times today. It is truly a tragedy, what happened that day. So too, what has followed. I mourn a world that may have stood a much better chance of defeating some of the long-standing tragedies of our time. AIDS, poverty, global warming... Some may argue (justly) that advances have been made in those battles over the past half-decade but I have no doubt that successes would be far greater had much of the world not turned it's thinking and it's budgets over to "defense".
4 comments:
When I was in Hawaii I saw a movie called "Who killed the electric car?" (maybe it's come to Canada as well?). It was all about the fact that an electric car model with perfectly adequate performance has already been invented and was being marketed for a while in during the mid-nineties but was then totally removed from the market (the cars were actually recalled and destroyed) and hushed up for various reasons such as oil business, car business-politics etc. It was enough to make you want to cry - here they had a perfectly good invention to help decrease pollution and it was removed cause it threatened business.
That about sums it up for me. It's all about economic incentive: If it was more economically lucrative to create environmentally friendly products, I believe in maybe 10 years we could probably have a totally renewable and clean system in place. If the AIDS epidemic wasn't mainly in African and other poor countries, we would have put in so much more resources to find a cure or at least stop the spreading.
Hope is never lost but as long as money is the guiding principle in the world you can't count on our efforts being put into what is actually best for the WORLD and not best for business. At times the two happen to coincide and in those instances progress is lightning fast. In other instances the two don't coincide and it's slow as molasses. That's my jaded outlook on it anyway...
/Phil
Too true Phil,
I don't want to be Mr. Jaded Blogger that only posts about how the end of the world is nigh' and how everything is a conspiracy. That being said, it often feels like the end of the world is nigh' (at least nigh'er than it should be) and that everything is a conspiracy. CBC here in Canada did carry a story related to "Who Killed the Electric Car?" so I'm familiar with the weirdness of the story but haven't seen the movie. Still, the idea that things happen due to money definitely resonates with me (and saddens me too).
I guess to me the fact that money runs most of our world is actually not very controversial. But I understand your comment on not wanting to be "Mr Jaded Blogger". I probably come of as very cynical to some people but I also maintain a strong faith in humanity to actually solve these things. We've solved equally difficult problems before after all!
You hold a prespective of great value in this world. An acknowledgement of "the way things are" but an unwillingness to completely accept it. Even a positive outlook to boot. I fell like we all would benefit if we were a little more like that.
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