And give the UN the funds and authority it needs.

A pseudo conversation in the form of YouTube anecdotes, from people like us, isn’t that interesting.

Giving everyone access to wi-fi won’t do anything to help a highly impoverished kid in Newark. There’s a lot more to education than handing a kid internet access and walking away.

A bunch of white guys suggesting on video clips how to change the world. Big deal.

I’ve got an idea. Why don’t they just stay home? Who needs a bunch of mostly unelected elitists figuring out for themselves what’s good for the rest of us, with solutions that almost always involve increased centralized government power and loss of national sovereignty. The lack of self-consciousness of these elitists is truly remarkable. Note that virtually every one of the issues in the video comes from the left side of the political spectrum. If such a conference focused on the right side, we’d no doubt be hearing conspiracy theories about how the Rockefellers, Bildebergers, and clandestine groups are trying to take over the world. And, rightly so. Social computing has now empowered the people to debate issues and organize themselves. If they really cared about “the people” instead of telling the people how to run their lives and how they would rule the world, they wouldn’t be wasting their carbon footprints on such an exercise of vanity. (Steve Boriss, The Future of News)

It’s an interesting question though to ask and I think for me it comes down to a single point: That the world’s problems lie more in the fact that as we progress through independence and secularism, our motivation for caring for those around us is diminishing as our certain desperation for making our own lives better increases. I’m certainly not arguing that independence is bad, but just look at the US. We have become a very wealthy nation where our freedoms are certainly in excess, however our willingness to help a neighbor in their time of need is countered either by how inconvenient it is to how much it will cost us in the end, and that’s not just monetarily. I think many times we’d rather the government do it even if we have to pay a little more tax to make it happen. In fact in many cases we don’t even know our neighbors, which makes this type of lifestyle all the easier.

Of course, this is a tough issue to address. In fact it is certainly easier to note the problem than to come up with an effective solution. But somehow we have to find a way to encourage the idea of community on the local level to deal with this issue. And I believe if we do then we can start to deal with the more technicolor issues like poverty.