Halfway 50 years ago the war in Vietnam was honest receipt scorching, the city of Watts, a community at the edge of Los Angeles, had been devastated by turbulence and conflagration; the first of many riots that would befall across America and the seeds for creating the Black Power movement were planted. At the same time, Martin Luther Baron was marching in Montgomery, Alabama for equal rights and copious tender nation confessed as hippies were flooding the streets in the search of peace and love. The writer / historian Todd Gitlin refers to these times as years of assumption and days of rage.
All the incidences I have mentioned occurred in 1965, the same year the classic song was released with the term, " What the World Needs Now Is Love. " The music was by Burt Bacharach and the lyrics were written by a person by the pseudonym of Hal David. The song was rapidly popularized as a metaphor for expectancy amidst all the rage of the times.
Now halfway a half century succeeding, what the world still needs is love luscious love. And if we go back another 100 years or 10, 000 years ago, what the world needed in consequence was also... love sweet love.
Upon thinking of this, a matter necessarily emerges: Why have we human beings not learned from history? The history of our genus is a healthy - soaked balance of ruthless torture and murder; of civil wars, of world wars, religious wars and other atrocities of rapture and hatefulness. And in representation of all this, as the new millennium goes into its second decade, the world is still not at still with itself.
Our world history is not a majestic history although it is written as if it was - school family are raised to rank so - called heroes close as Alexander the Great, Napoleon and others that sought world domination at the cost of human suffering and human lives. Indeed, the history books communicate us of Alexander ' s great triumphs but I have launch none that reports the death, starvation or human torment that he caused in the wake of his victories. Indeed, we hear little of the places he troglodytic behind in ruin and, if you will, stacked with plebeians and... filled with desolate numbers of wretched hearts.
Today most of the world claims to be " civilized " and yet MOST human suffering is unnecessary. MOST starvation around the world, for example, is the result of the egocentric workings of armies and governments. Famine and other natural causes are rare and isolated but human selfishness is at the core of most human suffering... like hunger and lack of medicine. Stark poverty itself is a condition of politics and not a phenomenon of Nature as some would have us believe. Even in America, the wealthiest nation on the planet has ghettos and barrios evolve out of its own system that is elite in the nooks and crannies of its economic structures. Poverty, for example, is treated as being untrustworthy and inept. Loans, if given at all to the poor person, have higher interest rates, in our court system the poor are far more likely to be sentenced for the same crime the wealthy or even the middle class are given " slaps on the hand for. "
In other places of the world - especially in third - world countries - the poor are simply left on their own to survive while, the rich and powerful drain the economy of its cash and other resources. And so in those places cold and ruthless elitism raises its head in a parade of social demigods marching to the beat of self - serving importance.
There will always be richer and poorer of course and there ' s nothing wrong with this. However, what is generally missed in socio / cultural observations is that poverty, like wealth, is usually inherited. Think about this as it is an observation that typically goes by the wayside: Poverty, like riches, is typically handed down, most often from one generation to the next. Indeed, the birthright of the poor, in general, is lack of education and hard labor. In our times, however, labor is not plentiful - the machine has even taken over ditch digging so the entire employment possibilities have been reduced for the laborer and increased for the technician. While this is a signal of positive progression, it is also a reason why the homeless population is growing and often the underlying cause for family breakup. Add this worker ' s - world - phenomenon to our own foreign manufacturing plus our ever - increasing dependency on imports and you have set the stage for a wider gap economic system and the slow deterioration of the American Dream... at least for the many.
So, in this view, there is a narrowing of the gap between third - world detachment from its poor and the lack of concern the industrial country has for expanding poverty itself and so the rapidly growing populations of the impoverished.
Most virtually only a handful of Americans endure the horrors of absolute poverty. That is, the condition of clinical starvation and the death and illness that accompany mal - nutrition. Yet the statistics tell us that 36. 3 million people, including 13 million children live in U. S. environments that experience hunger or the risk of hunger daily. It is said the 3 million children live in homes where meals are skipped or where there is simply too little to eat. This, to me, is a disgraceful condition for the any country of great wealth. In any case, there is nearly a billion around the globe suffering from malnutrition ( the actual count is more but unknown ).
Indeed, poor nutrition plays a role in the deaths of 10. 9 million children each year. Most of the hungry and starving are in Asia, Sub - Saharan Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean ( where some drug cartels are raking in billions ), the Near East and North Africa and the least in developed countries. In view of the staggering number of hungry - the undernourished and sufferers of malnutrition - we know that there is enough food produced in the world to feed... everyone. Probably waste alone would tackle a portion of the challenges!
One major challenge to reduce chronic hunger is that the vast majority of the hungry do not have enough land to grow their own food and they do not have the income to purchase enough food. Even in America where urbanization is constantly growing and farmlands are being reduced to become commercial properties - even home gardens are beginning to be a lost opportunity for a great many and anyway the demands for a two - income family rarely allots the time growing food takes. But none of these observations is the major cause for people suffering chronic hunger in the world.
Man ' s inhumanity to man is - the economic and political systems; military might and corrupt governmental power. Millions of innocent people are " murdered " each year by the greed and structures of socio - cultural systems. These systems simply take over control of resources and income, as said earlier. They are dictatorships by any other name. India has an abundance of poor and hungry people but then again so does Saudi Arabia with all its oil wealth and Afghanistan with its billion - dollar drug trade.
As always, there is a lot of talk about impacting the world of hunger by giving aide to the poorer countries and helping them become more productive in feeding their own. And while I am all in favor of making world hunger go away, I should think that we should start by making it go away on our own home front. After all, 36. 3 million hungry people including 13 million children seem like a lot of unnecessary suffering in a country such as our own.
In overview, little has changed since the advent of civilization - our species is still killing and torturing each other in the quest for wealth and power; we still have a world of people impoverished ( unnecessarily ) making up a massive global population of the hungry, sick and dying. We are still constructing cultural and religious conflicts as they were constructed by the warlords of ancient times. Both racism and sexism rages on although, these days, they are clad in all kinds of guises. Will it and can it ever change?
Yes but what the world needs now, as it has always needed... is love. Bureaucracies will never bring this about. The possibility of making a better, safer, kinder and yes, happier world begins with you and me - one should never lose sight of the fact that societies and cultures are nothing other than a collection of individuals. And so while the world has always needed love sweet love the only way that the world will become a more loving place is when each of us become more loving in our own lives.
In this note, I will remind you or the words of Bernie Siegel who said: If you want to make the world a better more peaceful place, you can do it in a decade: Love the children today and they will take that love into the next generation with them.
