Reply #48: So you would run away then

[kcr]

First, you should never make the mistake of assuming that people who defend walmart shoppers are defending walmart. The one does not follow from the other.

Second, you keep repeating the problem as if it is self-evident that your solution -- denying others the same things that you and I benefit from -- is the only solution. It is not.

And I will go so far to say that it is among the least moral of the possible solutions. You link articles written by intellectuals extolling the simple life that the poorest lead before the modern world intruded and claiming that only that life is fit. And yet you shy form the implications of that. You would decide for them that they must have the same high mortality rate, the same lack of access to other choices, the same poor health care, the same traditional, sometimes stifling gender roles, the same infant mortality rate that modern society has managed to alleviate. That is not acceptable.

You are advocating destroying the futures of millions if not billions of future children on your say so. Again, I ask you -- has not technology allowed placed with in our reach the ability to feed and clothe everyone, to educate everyone, to allow everyone to experience any culture to the depth that desire, to give everyone the chance to follow their dreams? And have we not done this while improving the efficiency and environmental impact? And you would turn away from all this because it is not yet perfect?

No. No today, no tomorrow, no a hundred times and a hundred times that. We are supposed ot be a decent society. We are supposed to be a civilization worthy of the term. If we are, if we are worth anything, than we cannot and must not leave the least of us behind without even the attempt to give them benefits that we have generated for ourselves.

Unhappy that the third world does not share in those benefits? Good. So am I. But use that unhappiness to balance that injustice, to make sure the third world does receive all the benefits. Don't walk away from them. Don't turn your back on them. Don't decide for them that they don't want those or need those benefits. Help them arrive at a place where they can afford to make the choice for themselves.