Live 8: Musings over music

Let The Man know you're sick of people being poor. Sign the petition at www.live8live.com.

(This concert has had me drinking coffee, mulling things over, and I've written a couple separate things on it. This is the first. Inset is a younger Bob Geldof, tirelessly pursuing this issue over the last two decades, inspiring others to get involved, and ultimately spearheading this suprising potential catalyst for worldwide discussion. This is what music is capable of... Inspiring people. Let's hope.)

On the Live 8 coverage Geldof has just introduced the original BBC news video that caused Geldof and his then-wife to weep like a child one night near Christmas, 1984, when that drought in Africa was raging. A young 2-year-old boy in Africa keeps trying to stand up, with the Cars’ Who’s Gonna Drive You Home playing in the background. This video unleashed great emotion in the UK, emotion that Geldof used to create a worldwide movement for African famine relief.

It was that emotion that demanded immediate action, but it’s this concert that demands long-term solution.

Logistically, hunger can be ended. Today, we know this. It’s a fact. Crops can be adapted to terrains. This is happening in laboratories around the world. It’s even happening on a micro-scale with independent African grain/seed wholesalers talking to their local farmers and learning what crops are yielding better returns and which are failing, and then moving to tailor-make grain and seed combinations best suited for the harsh growing environment found in varying troubled regions.

The methods for ending poverty, for ending hunger, they’re there. For the first time ever, we truly know how we can feed the world.

But we don’t have the means to get it done, and not because they’re not available, but because we refuse to get involved. We have world leaders like George Bush running around and posturing for the press, claiming they’ve “doubled” and “tripled” foreign spending, but the reality is, they’ve done fuck all. (In Bush’s time in office, it’s raised by barely half, despite need being greater than any time in histroy.)

But let’s not put the blame squarely on the leaders. Us folk are at fault, too. In America, for instance, the public has been found to believe the government contributes 30 times more to foreign aid than is the actual case.

In Canada, we believe our leaders when they say they’re committing only what they know they can deliver, rather than stating a bloated sum and failing to make good on the full amount.

During this concert, and in much of the press I’ve seen, everyone’s trying to blame the politicians for the lack of action on these issues, but we’re every bit as accountable as they are. In our ignorance we fail to realize the depth of global poverty and hunger, what the ramifications for our future might be if this widespread hardship is left unchecked.

We need to be responsible and knowledgeable of world crises. We need to care more about current events, not just tuning into the news when it's locally pertinent to us.

More than 40 years ago, John F. Kennedy said it would be a great, great tragedy if that generation did not do everything in its power to avert world hunger. And 40 years later, we’ve still failed to be accountable for our role in the fight to help our fellow people.

Africa is a continent of mysticism, beauty, history, and tradition. It is its great misfortune to have been so vastly different in culture, so tribal and free, that white man came in and decimated much of what had made it so beautiful. We unleashed one of the greatest genocides known to the world on Africa just a century ago, killing more than 10 million in the Northeast, and have stood almost idly by as genocide after genocide has transpired. From Idi Amin to Darfur, we have constantly watched in apathy, dismissing Africa as a lost cause.

And soon, we might well be right about that.

Poverty and hunger are not confined to Africa, they exist the world over. But they exist on such a widespread level in Africa that the situation has become catastrophic. It’s poverty and hunger that helps fuel the AIDS crisis, conjures more young soldiers and fighters in the civil strife, perpetuating the civil strife brough to screen last Christmas in Hotel Rwanda. And it’s poverty and hunger that continues to feed the corruption and greed amongst those in power, and that threatens the future of an entire generation faced with malnutrition and starvation.

And we shrug and say the system’s so broke we can’t fix it, not here at home, and certainly not across the water.

We need to dream bigger. We need to believe we can find a way. After all, the money needed to run a local lab for bio-engineering applicable crops to the area is the same as the budget for a single fighter jet in the American Army. Per year. Yet these labs are continuously closing, in locations around the world, due to lack of support and lack of funds.

The cost of grains and seeds and education for local farmers is almost neglible. And yes, these nations are receiving some funds, but not enough, and what they do receive, our governments are not ensuring that their leaders are staying honest and doing the right thing. We give because we’re expected to, and we look the other way when it’s mishandled.

We can accomplish more than we have. We can speak more than we do. Thus far, we’ve chosen not to. Now it’s time to make a new choice.

It’s time we realize the world should be interdependent, that there is a global right to comfort and ease.

After all, mankind created capitalism. Isn’t it time mankind find a way to adapt it for the benefit of all, and not just the chosen few?

Dream a bigger dream. Join the movement. End poverty now.