Doug.Renz@rochgte.FIDONET.ORG (Doug Renz) (01/16/91)
Why? Why does 1/3 of the worlds population eat 2/3 of the worlds food and 40,000 children starve to death every day? Why does every 90 minutes a teenager committ suicide? Why does 1 out of every 2 marriages turn into divorce? Why do we try to prevent an overpopulated world by using abortion as a means of killing our future in our mothers wombs? The list goes on...... but does anybody care??? -- Doug Renz - via FidoNet node 1:260/230 UUCP: ...!rochester!ur-valhalla!rochgte!Doug.Renz INTERNET: Doug.Renz@rochgte.FIDONET.ORG
asylvain@felix.UUCP (Alvin "the Chipmunk" Sylvain) (01/23/91)
In article <233.2794557C@rochgte.FIDONET.ORG> Doug.Renz@rochgte.FIDONET.ORG (Doug Renz) writes: > > Why? Why not? > Why does 1/3 of the worlds population eat 2/3 of the worlds food [?] It may have something to do with *growing* 2/3's of the world's food. The US is the world's largest food exporter, despite what we happen to keep at home and throw away. I offer no excuse for being successful. > and 40,000 children starve to death every day? Poor politics, poor distribution systems, and ignorance. It certainly isn't for any shortage of food. Some areas throw away their surplus harvests because they have no way to store it for leaner times. Often, storing it for leaner times is perfectly available, but isn't done because of custom and tradition. Many Socialist regimes have no incentives for people to work, so the harvest simply rots in the ground instead of being harvested. Communist China once did a grand experiment where they allowed the farmers to have small patches of land which they could do *anything they wanted* with. The rest, of course, remained "the People's land." These small patches, amounting to less than 10% of the farmland, produced more than 80% of the food. (My memory may be faulty on the exact numbers) Why? Profit motive. Greed, if you like. Greed motivates people to work, while Socialism expects work because of grand, altruistic moral- ity, which simply doesn't exist in the human animal. > Why does every 90 minutes a teenager committ suicide? Well, that keeps them out of trouble ... (I know, I know, insensitive remark, but I couldn't resist.) Actually, there are many reasons for this. I remember hearing one school "brag" about it's suicide rate, as an indicator of how tough it was. Drugs are certainly a big factor in teen suicide. Legalization combined with improved handling of addicts would help there. Under our current system, addicts are more or less ignored while the police go after pushers right and left. This only serves to increase the price, and makes the problem worse. Pregnacy accounts for some fraction of causes. Girls get pregnant, and can no longer face daddy. To some extent, we would probably eliminate some of these problems tomorrow if we took all the money going to drug enforcement and put it into both drug and sex education programs. I've heard of studies interviewing teenagers who had gotten AIDS. Unbeliev- able as it sounds, many of them just didn't know any better. "Condom? Oh, yeah, my uncle bought one of those downtown last year ..." > Why does 1 out of every 2 marriages turn into divorce? Because 3 out of 4 people who marry do so without fully analyzing what they're getting themselves into. (The reason it's 3 of 4 is because in the 2 of 4 who stayed married, half were simply lucky.) It it tremendously easy, and socially encouraged, for people to get mar- ried. It is *not* socially encouraged to do anything to decide whether a certain mate is compatible. (Believe it or not, people are still checking their astrological signs.) Communication is *not* encouraged, outside of platitudes like "you should communicate!" "OK, I told her I'd be late, so I communicated, right?" Not quite. We in the Western world have seen too many movies where "living happily ever after" means the movie ends with the hero and heroine getting mar- ried. We expect, consciencely or unconsciensely, that once we've married our problems are over. Sorry, folks, it's just the beginning! We have classes in classes in social etiquette, parenting, child-birth- ing, child-raising, all sorts of silly things people used to learn from their parents and grandparents. There are *no* classes in life-mate selection. We're beginning to see classes in life-mate communication, which should help. > Why do we try to prevent an overpopulated world by using abortion as > a means of killing our future in our mothers wombs? I have a coupla questions about your question; why do you assume the world is overpopulated? I'd say the population is simply not distri- buted well. With intelligent use of our resources and technology, we could probably afford to double earth's population with no more than some inconveniences. You may, for example, need something like a Bullet Train network to commute to work. (We might as well start thinking about it now ... like it or not, at our current rate of growth, earth's population *will* double, sooner or later!) Why do you think anyone uses abortion to prevent overpopulation? I'd say the reasons are a heckuva lot more personal in nature. When a woman is considering abortion, I doubt if world population problems enters her mind for more than 4 milliseconds. This topic gets on everybody'd emotional hot button, so I'm not going to say anything more on it. > The list goes on...... but does anybody care??? Yes. I see you have no solutions in mind. I do. If you care to hear some of them, let me know. Some of these problems should probably be separated into other newsgroups. For example, food shortages can be discussed in talk.politics.misc. Divorse can be discussed in soc.couples. Etc. Or were you just being rhetorical, without really wanting any hard answers to your questions? Frequently people like to ask simple questions, like "why can't I be rich?", or "why can't I be good looking?" When you tell them that get- ting rich means hard work and long hours, or being good looking means eating less and excercising more, you'll get glassy stares in response. The basic premise is that if there's a goal, there's a means to acheiv- ing that goal, but you must be willing to work towards that goal. How- ever, most people who ask questions like these are looking for easy, simple answers. They want to hear that it's pre-ordained, or "it's in God's Secret Plan," or that the system has built-in blocks that work against you. They want an easy excuse so they can continue belly-aching without doing any work. So, getting back to your original question ... "WHY?" Rewording it to encompass your entire post ... "Why do we have bad a situation?" The answer is, "Because you are not improving it." > Doug Renz -- asylvain@felix.UUCP (Alvin "the Chipmunk" Sylvain) =========== Opinions are Mine, Typos belong to /usr/ucb/vi =========== "We're sorry, but the reality you have dialed is no longer in service. Please check the value of pi, or see your SysOp for assistance." =============== Factual Errors belong to /usr/local/rn =============== UUCP: uunet!{hplabs,fiuggi,dhw68k,pyramid}!felix!asylvain ARPA: {same choices}!felix!asylvain@uunet.uu.net
qxlrnglx@buhub (Brian Howard) (01/23/91)
The last time I was in on a conversation like this I heard a cute quote: "Most people are, by definition, average." Says something about the current status of the "average," eh? Maybe part of the problem is that there aren't enough people acting as good examples. If those who care start working to help people more than they are already, then perhaps people will begin acting differently. Unfortunately, with a population this large, any change at all would take quite some time to bring about. Most people seem to show rather little interest in a project of which they might not live long enough to see the results....