Yes Virginia, there is still news happening

[darkfyre_muse]

So as mentioned last month, or was it October?, I am trying to be a better citizen of the world and strive to keep up on current events. This includes domestic, world, and professional areas. To this end I try to read 2 or 3 articles at WSJ online everyday and am broadening my exposure to the blogosphere. With that in mind this post by Ms. Trunk really bugged me.
http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2008/12/08/work-stuff-that-makes-me-happy/
Especially the following comment:
“1. This is my favorite time of year for news. Because there isn't any.
We are entering the slowest news time of the year, yet the December 8 issue of Time magazine is great. When the world would stops generating big, huge, overwhelming news like world peace, world hunger, and world war, then Time magazine reporters spend their time finding the workplace angle on stories I care about.”

Ah, No. The news doesn’t stop, US media just stops reporting on it. Example, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122945261342811107.html . Now the lack of coverage of strife in Africa generally pisses me off. But if you don’t have anything more pressing to say wouldn’t now be a good time to address some of these issues? Heck, there is even a vast selection of topics to choose from. Pick an African nation. Pick a topic , war, hunger, poverty, human rights violations. These are things that the general populations in the west tend to ignore. (please note I said the west, Europe doesn’t get a pardon on this, thanks)
The truly sad part is that it seems the predominant reason we are marginalizing these populations is the lack of natural resources they offer, e.g. oil.
This train of thought inevitably brings me back to something that has been playing loudly in my brain for months now. It has been too damn long since I havedone something about any of it.

Jumping off the soapbox now.

Comments

[drlori.livejournal.com]

Its hard to do "something" about a lot of the African issues. Most of them are actually civil wars. That doesn't make them right or any less horrible its just that getting involved in someone else's family fight doesn't usually go well.
Heifer International is nice because they provide small grants, or better live animals, that people can use to change their lives.
Its also why I've decided to focus on birth. I figure starting at the beginning is a good starting point.

[darkfyre-muse.livejournal.com]

Short of a youthful longing to run off to Africa or india or somewhere else exotic and house the poor, most of my service aspirations are domestic and local. Homelessness in general has been a cause of mine since I was 16. It is amazing how close even the most stable professionals are to being on the street.
Since then it has become wider in that I want to actually solve the root problem and not just put a band-aid on it. In college I worked with a couple organizations that worked on just that.
Currently I am considering doing something along the lines of community development of transitional housing and programs to solve the problems that perpetuate homelessness.