MODERN TIMES, FOR SOME

So here we are, so many of us in so many nations living a real high-tech existence, all i-pods, microwaves, high speed trains, computers and controlled indoor climates. We fly around in jets and communicate with the farthest corners of the world in the blink of an eye, shrinking our once vast planet. Our cities are gleaming citadels of progress, our farms high-tech wonders providing us with ever-increasing yields. Our medical scientists are constantly extending our average life spans and vast amounts of information are at our fingertips. The future is now and the living is good. A great time to be alive, no?

But you look a little deeper and you see that these conditions are far from universal. You notice entire communities in Kenya killing scores of people they figured were witches. You see images of lost tribes in the Amazon pointing their Stone Age weapons at passing aircraft. You wonder why in supposedly high-tech China people still seek mystical healing from dead tigers. And in India, a place that graduates more PhD's in computer sciences than any other nation, that some people sill cripple their children so they can be more effective beggars and more than half that nation lives, works and farms as if it was still the Middle Ages. A poverty-stricken Middle Ages.

In much of the world, people eke out a horrible living from the land they have never understood how to manage and it grows more barren every year as the result of ancient faming techniques, even though the information on how to correct this is readily available. You see military governments, dictators and kings living in decadent splendor while most of their citizens cannot read, have very little to eat and die in droves from easily treated diseases. You look around this shrinking planet and notice how so much hatred fills so many souls, with tribe-on-tribe genocide becoming commonplace to the point that nobody is shocked by a quarter of a million violent deaths anymore.

Even in the United States, the poster child for modern living, our nation spends more money per year on weapons and armies that the rest of the world combined even though we have less than 5% of the world's population. And for all that dough we can't even find our only proven enemy, Osama bin Laden, who lives in a part of he world a hundred years behind us in technology. So America contents itself with subjugating Iraq and Afghanistan and making an even bigger mess out of those two nations than they previously made of themselves, no easy thing to do. One would have said ten years ago that nothing could be worse in those two places, anybody could do better. Of course no one could have predicted America electing a semi-retarded president who likes to dress in costumes and start wars just for the hell of it. That sort of punched quite a few holes in our international standing.

So let's appreciate the modern amenities we have even more, knowing that we are privileged to be among that portion of humanity to enjoy these fruits of technological progress. Each of us is only an accident of birth away from scraping out a Medieval existence in some barren backwater, living in fear of the machete, drought and disease. And maybe we can take some of that huge military budget and help less fortunate nations to join us in the 21st century. It is said that no man is completely free when one man is a slave. And if that slavery takes the form of ignorance, hatred, kings, dictators, poverty, war and disease, there's quite a bit of work cut out for all of us before we can call ourselves a modern race. Let's help our brothers and sisters.