World War III (Long)

[Guest guest]

I want to look ahead from grief, and

sorrow, and shock, and talk about action. I want us to consider why people are

angry at the

United States. We empower ourselves

with knowledge, and we heal ourselves with action that has a purpose and has

consequences.

To seek to understand violence is not to condone it. Violence

makes things simple, because it is wrong, and we know it is wrong,

and therefore to punish the

perpetrators of violence is right. But we can look to the history of any war to

see that aggression harms

the way people think, and limits their

possibilities, for a long time after the war, for generations. In addition to

retribution, we also

need to think about justice, because

that is a bigger question, and it involves all of us. Most of us are not able

to find and punish

terrorists. But all of us can take

actions that create justice in the world.

Kofi n, the Secretary General of

the United Nations, described the condition of the world in this way in his

report to the Millenium

Conference. Fifteen percent of the

world's population are well-off on a world scale, 7% are in between, and 78%

are poor. Calculated

another way, 20 percent of the people

have 86% of the wealth, which means 80 percent of the people have 14% of the

wealth.

Eighty percent of the people of the

world have only fourteen percent of the wealth of the world.

This inequality is getting greater,

and many people have experienced a deterioration in their capacity to sustain

themselves over the

past generation or so. What I mean by

this is that people who are farmers are hungrier and they work harder. People

who have

educations and work at salaried jobs

are losing their ability to sustain themselves with their work, and cannot find

for their children

the education they themselves

received. Today, we feel more afraid in our lives, but violence perpetrated by

the desperately poor is

part of people's everyday lives in

many parts of the world. Half of humanity lives on less than two dollars a day.

People who experience this, or who see it around them, can

look at the level of consumption of North Americans and find it to be

obscene. That we can live our lives as

we do, and expend wealth as we do, oblivious of the poverty of half the human

race, is

obscene.

Kofi n said, " Extreme poverty

is an affront to our common humanity. It also makes many other problems

worse. " People see

this extreme poverty as unjust And

many people see the United States making, and sustaining, the rules that keep

it that way.

Imagine some people are playing

Monopoly. They play for awhile, and buy almost all the property, and then you

join the game. You

say, " Give me some property, so I

can play. "

They say, " No, you have to buy

property. " You say, " That's not fair. " They say, " We can't

help it, those are the rules. " You say, " But I

can never win if you already own all

the property " . They say, " The game only works if people play by the

rules. " In a very real sense

in the world we live in, some people

make the rules that everybody has to play by. And if everyone had an equal

voice in making the

rules, the rules would be different.

Antibiotics can reduce aids transmission rates by 50%, and tuberculosis drugs

can reduce aids

death rates by 30 %, and

anti-retroviral drugs keep people alive.

Many, many people in the world want

these medicines to be produced generically, to be available to everyone who

needs them. But

this country is among those that have

upheld the primacy of intellectual property rights, so people die because they

do not have

access to medicine which exists, which

could save them, which other people in the world receive.

This year, five thousand Africans are dying every day of

AIDS. That is 35 thousand deaths every week, one hundred and forty seven

thousand deaths every month, more than

four million in the year. As we are experiencing the enormity of unnecessary

death in this

country, and mourning the loss of

people we knew, and people we did not know, that can help us to wrap our minds

around the

tragedy of AIDS, and understand why

people are angry at us for the rules we uphold.

What is essential to keep in mind is

that the deep division between rich and poor which we think of as the North and

the South, the

developed and the developing, the

first world and the third world, is a relatively new thing in historical terms.

It is not natural; things

have not always been this way. There

is only one world. The parts of it came to have the characteristics they now

have in interaction

with each other, mostly over the last

six hundred years.

Think of it like a human body that

begins to focus its capacity to grow in a few areas, depriving other areas of

resources. Imagine that

this sickness of uneven growth

continues for a long time in the human body: the parts of it receiving more

than their share of

resources become deformed and swollen.

The parts of the body deprived of resources become atrophied; those body parts

don't

function. As long as the unbalanced

distribution of nutrients is not treated, the disease will get worse. This is

the condition of the

world we live in.

It is sick, it has been sick for a

long time, and all of our efforts to heal it do not work, because we are not

recognizing the systemic

nature of the illness. In fact, we

invest a tremendous amount of energy in not noticing the systemic nature of the

illness. Think about

the last few years, and how we have

responded to the manifestations of the world's unbalanced growth. When we hear

about

violence in Liberia, Ethiopia, Rwanda,

Bosnia, do we think about it as their war, caused by their intolerance?

A war in Angola, which people did not

choose for themselves, has been going on for 25 years. In Sudan, 2 million

people have died

and 5 million have been displaced by

war that has lasted for forty years, off and on. A war began in the Congo in

1997; and in the last

two years, three million people,

almost all non-combatants, have died because of this war. And the world has

looked away, and

said, it is their problem. But it is

our problem, not merely because of our common humanity, but because our

economic and social

and political lives are deeply,

intimately connected with those of all the people of the world, and they have

been, for a long time. An

untreated disease gets worse, the

symptoms spread into the parts of the body that did not appear to be infected

before.

I think this is how we need to

understand the destruction of the World Trade center and the attack on the

Pentagon. These attacks

are terrible tragedies. The people who

died were innocent, and the people who caused it have to be punished. But

attacking

terrorists is not enough. It is not an

adequate response. We can recognize the possibility of truly making the world

safe from

terrorism, if we recognize that the

underlying cause of terrorism is related to the underlying cause of war in the

Congo, and the

despair which gets labeled as

religious or ethnic violence. The fundamental cause of all of this death and

violence is the appalling

heritage of a few centuries of unequal

development. The world does not have to be the way we have made it. Since

people created

these conditions, people can also

change them. And the people who can change them is everyone, it is us. We

change the

conditions of the world by changing

the way we act in the world.

Think of the unfair monopoly game. It

does not take a revolution to make the game

fairer, it just takes people changing

the way they play it. Did you ever

play Monopoly and give away property

to make the game last longer? We can do that, in the real world. We can change

the rules so

they are fair for everyone. Forgiving

the debt of the poorest nations would do this. Making voting at the United Nations

more equitable

would do this. Taxing international

financial transactions and using that wealth to build infrastructure in the

poorest parts of the world

could do it.

The world has 345 billionaires. The

total combined worth of those 345 people is greater than the GDP of countries

in the world

whose total population accounts for

more than half the world's population. They could be taxed on international

transactions, and that

wealth could be used to assist those

who are most disadvantaged by global economic activity, and the billionaires

would still be ok.

They'd still be comfortable. And, we

would all be safer.

Moving the world to a place where

people have less reason to be angry at the United States is not just the

responsibility of

governments, or the UN. We, as

ordinary people, have tremendous power to make the world more equitable. We are

the cells and

the sinews and the bone of the tightly

integrated, coherent organism which is the world, and all our actions have an

effect far beyond

ourselves. We have power as consumers,

and if we choose to, we can use that power to create equitable working

conditions for

the producers of the goods we consume.

We have tremendous power as citizens of a democratic society, and if we choose

to use

it, we can wield that power to elect

leaders who recognize and are committed to transforming the fundamental

imbalances that

burden the world. Because we have

freedom of expression in this country, we can hold our leaders accountable if

they fail to act in

ways that benefit the whole of

humanity. We are only empowered to take these actions if we understand, if we

can see ourselves

as part of an organically connected

world. So we change the world when we work to change ourselves, and the way we

think. All of

these actions are powerful, all of

them are effective. Think about the abolition of slavery. The widespread and

systematic

enslavement of Africans was a large

part of what created the world's current imbalance, and there was a time, not

so very long ago,

when people thought of slavery as

natural and inevitable. Just the same way that we make global inequality

natural and inevitable

when we say first world, third world,

traditional and modern. But some people came to realize that slavery was not

natural, it was not

acceptable, and they resolved to

change it.

They took actions which did not seem

to be in their own material best interest. They began a war of ideas, saying

that what people

accepted as normal, and moral, was in

fact abnormal and immoral. They changed the way they thought, they changed the

way they

acted in the world. and the world

changed. We can do the same thing. We can decide that the extremes of wealth

and poverty in the

world are entirely unacceptable. We

can systematically, deliberately intervene to change those conditions by the

way we participate

in the economy, the way we participate

in the government of our own country, and in the way we participate in the life

of society. This

is our

capacity, it is our responsibility, and no one can prevent us from exercising

that capacity, if we recognize that we have it.

Bob the Wholeone