We should help the poor because we're rich and they aren't but then after we've helped them, it seems to me we have the right to ask a lot of people of the world, who resent the success of our civilization, who they haven’t done more to help themselves.
Men and women from the poorest, most underdeveloped countries make their way to the United States and prosper in our society. Professional and business people from economically retarded countries come here and frequently distinguish themselves. Individuals are not responsible for national failures. So who is?
Almost all of Europe, South America, Russia, China and Japan have working economies, stable governments, police forces, a judicial system, rods and public services like water and electricity. At the same time, dozens of countries in other parts of the world do not have the amenities of civilization. The United Nations has estimated that half the people on earth love in poverty.
If it weren’t for television, which occasionally shows it to us, we wouldn’t understand poverty at all. Poverty to us means a handful of dysfunctional homeless people in our town. Few are in danger of starving or freezing to death. Real poverty means whole countries whose people not only don't have jobs they don’t have an organized society, houses, food clean water, places to go to the bathroom. Forget bedrooms, two-car garages, swimming pools, refrigerators, central hearing and air conditioning. They don’t have houses.
Poverty anywhere in the world is a concern to us because we ‘re nice guys and we’re pained to see hungry and unhappy humans anywhere. We are also concerned because it’s only human of the world’s poor to resent our prosperity, and we don’t like being hated.
You look for reasons why so many countries are what we euphemistically call”backward”. Many of the most depressed countries are under the heel of some oppressive potentate who keeps himself rich and the people poor. However, it isn’t easy to determine whether a dictator in a poor country is a cause or a result of nation’s problems.
It’s a mystery why the people living in the warmest parts of the earth are often the worst off. You’d think that not having to expend money, energy or resources staying warm would be an advantage but that doesn’t seem to be so. Africa is the warmest continent but it has many of the least successful societies.
Warm weather should give the people of Africa and the Arab countries a head start on prosperity. Even in the United States, for no discernible reason, the South was for years the poorest and most backward part of the country. In the past 50 years, the South has developed into one of the most prosperous parts of our country. Maybe it’s coincidence, but the change seems to have been concomitant with the development of air conditioning. Maybe we ought to raise the money to air condition the earth. It would be cheaper than war.
While I’m not comfortable using the term “Arab” because the definition of the word is vague, many Arab countries are not among the world’s most successful. If it were not for oil, they’d probably be destitute because they haven’t created any kind of economy for themselves independent of that natural resource.
There was a time in history when the Arab would led all others in the knowledge of geometry, astronomy, chemistry and medicine. Europeans in the Middle Ages learned Ages learned a lot of what they knew of science from the Arabs. They world has not learned much from Arab countries in recent centuries.
I don’t know how it can be done, but it’s important that we find out why the people of some parts of the world prosper while others live lives desperately devoid of pleasure or the basic necessities of the good life. You wonder why the poor cling to life as tenaciously as do those of us who have a life so clearly worth clinging to.
