I decided to record the Primetime Live special with Brad Pitt last night because of an email I received from the One Campaign. I am amazed every time I see the suffering and resiliency of the people of Africa. At one point in the interview as Pitt and Diane Sawyer were walking through a village in Africa he said that as Americans we won the lottery when we were born in this country. I think he's right, we didn't deserve to live like this any more than they deserve to live that, ad we aren't owed anything because of our privilege. Actually we owe the world, our neighbors, at the very least a chance to survive, which with statistics like these doesn't seem o be the case.
Sub-Saharan Africa, the part of the continent south of the Sahara Desert, is also the world's poorest place. Seventy percent of its people live on less than $2 a day. 200 million go hungry every day. This year at least a million Africans, most of them young children, will die of malaria and two million will die of AIDS. -- DATA.org
I really hated when Sawyer veered away from the people living in extreme poverty with disease and hunger to Pitt's personal life and then listening to some of the idiotic things he had to say about that (i.e. justifying his divorce by making it sound almost poetic, almost).
All in all it was a good program and I hope people saw the suffering and heard that it would not take much from us to reverse the problem, $16 dollars would pay for a whole year of education for an African child, tuition, uniform and books, wow.
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I'm always reminded that when Cain asked God "Am I my brother's keeper?" the answer was (implicitly) "Yes!"
We are so blessed.
We are so selfish.
It all makes me feel so helpless.
So much publicity about these problems lately, and yet so little has changed.
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