What kind of world are we living in?

We come to the end of a week where a young man has gone into a school and gunned down 28 people. 20 of them children. What’s insane is that there seems to still be some question about gun control in the US. It shouldn’t be a question of, should they ban weapons in the US it should be, when are we going to make this happen? The right to bear arms is based on an outdated, archaic set of rules. The United States Bill of Rights was adopted in 1791. It’s time to change but how do you do it. It won’t be easy. The question is, has the president got the balls to do it  and if he has then has he got enough power to do it. I guess the problem is do the rich and powerful in the states who can really make this happen even care about the death of 20 children? I don’t think they do. The world seems shocked by the recent events but what about in the areas of the world where this kind of thing goes on every day? We rarely get told about it and when we do there doesn’t seem to be this kind of uproar and no one really cares. There are conflicts and power struggles going on all over the world. Children and innocent adults are dying every day because of other peoples greed and want for power. Be it because of oil, religion, money or simply the desire for certain people to have power over other people,  trying to find some sort of justification to say “it’s ok to kill other people because they believe in a different fictional deity than I do”. The world is spiralling out of control into a global society driven by greed and power. If we continue like this we’re going to destroy our planet. It may already be too late.

I’m not pretending to know how to solve the problem but what I do know is with all the global wealth we could abolish hunger and poverty around the world but we don’t seem to want to. Every second there are people dying because they can’t even get a drink of water. I think John Lennon summed it up pretty well. All you need is love.

We need to stop living our lives as we are doing. We live in a world driven by marketing and completely irrelevant material possessions. What’s the latest TV? You need to buy this pair of jeans that’s costs 3 times as much because some marketing dick-head says it’s trendy and you should have it. How many people actually work in a job that’s actually does good or provides a vital service to other people? Yet we work so we can buy stupid things in a vain attempt to alleviate our boredom, or maybe it’s just to shut our brains off from thinking “I could be doing something much more with my life” but it’s ok, I have a nice telly and look did you see my new eco car? Never mind that it has just as much an environmental impact as a normal car. They just want you to believe that you are making a difference and can feel good about it. Being environmentally friendly is ‘in’ at the moment so the marketing people will tell you that you should be buying this new product when it still uses oil, it still gets made in a country by people who are essentially slaves, getting paid just enough to survive but never enough to improve their lives. What would be the point? Then who’d make our new phone or process the tortured animals into the latest yummy product on our super market shelves or fast food outlets? We need to all make sacrifices and start helping other people, not turning a blind eye. We are all capable of doing good in this world it’s just whether we can find time in our busy lives achieving nothing.

We keep the working classes poor while the well off people who predominately work in pointless jobs telling everyone what new thing they need in their lives. The poor people can’t afford it but get it anyway, we give them credit and make money off them so they can get this new thing that they don’t need, all just so they can be perceived as slightly more well off than they are in other people’s eyes. In the mean time the super rich get more rich off everyone, finding new ways to drain the planet of every natural resource while they still can.

We have all of these material possessions and live the comfortable lives we do as a result of the wars and conflicts going on around the world, securing oil and wealth in the less well off countries. More and more countries are embracing this ‘western’ way of life of having material possessions, not caring about the environment, with ‘taking what I can while I can’ attitudes and getting as rich as possible before we fuck everything up. You can live the life you do because the governments and big corporations are doing the things they are doing. Killing and oppressing innocent vulnerable people, taking what isn’t theirs, installing these ‘democracies’ in the major counties around the world so it can be controlled by a few greedy, powerful and very bad people.

Everyone knows right from wrong. Why is it that the rich and powerful seem to forget whats right and whats wrong? I guess they find a way of justifying what they’re doing so they can sleep at night. Hey, at least they’re rich and managed to get what they want. Never mind about what thats going to do to the planet in the future, how many people get killed in the process or how many people die every year because they have nothing to eat or drink.

Did you know Less than 1% of gross national income from all rich countries could feed the estimated 1 billion people starving from lack of food each year? We could essentially obliterate world poverty almost overnight by making a small sacrifice. That small sacrifice for you as an individual would just be your time. We just have to, as all one voice say NO. It’s not ok that we take what we want just so we can live slightly more comfortably than we already do. It’s not ok that 1 billion people around this planet can’t eat or get fresh drinking water.

You can’t raise this money yourselves but the governments of the world can. Easily. It’s estimated $91 billion a year would do it. The US Department of Defence Budget for 2010 was $663.8 billion. We’ll say it’s ok to spend this money to kill and oppress people in the name of national security and preventing terrorism but it’s not ok to spend this money to make sure everyone on the planet can at least eat something and have a drink of water.

In the same week that these innocent children got killed in Connecticut, HSBC has been found to have allowed itself to be used to launder billions of dollars for drug barons and potential terrorists for nearly a decade until 2010. I wonder how many men, women and children were killed and oppressed in that decade as a result of a supposedly normal, civilised, ‘western’ financial organisation? Yet all we do is fine them $1.5 billion. In 2011 their pre tax profits were $21.9 billion. Essentially what we’re saying to them is “You’ve contributed to the death and oppression of thousands if not millions of people, but thats ok just give us some money and you can go on as before, just sacrifice a few people in your company that we cam blame this on and do a better job of hiding it next time”.

If the guy that killed those 28 people in Newtown had survived and we said “hey thats ok you just have to give us some money and we’ll call it even.” Do you really think anyone would be ok with that? Is the money that HSBC got fined going to go towards helping people and doing good or is that going to be put towards funding more terror and more ways to go and take what we want? But it’s ok because it’s us causing the terror, there’s this new TV I want. It’s full HD you know.