Amazing Things.

This one could get a bit rambley.

You don't have to bear with me if you can't be arsed, so this is just a wee advance warning. If you are anything like me and hate reading rambley stuff you'll have stopped reading by now, which is why I find it amusing to address this entire useless, rambling paragraph - which, as we have already established, they are not going to read - to them.

There. After that, anyone who is left isn't going to mind a bit of ramblingness.

Humans are cool. We really are.

Which is why it's a shame that so many of us have to live in fear of starvation so that the rest of us can write blogs and read rambling shite about poverty.

But what do we do?

I have no idea. What I do know is that none of what we are currently doing is working. It's not working even a little bit, and in fact it's making it much much worse. The gap between the richest and poorest is increasing, the numbers of poor are rising (relatively and in real terms) and the avenues for social mobility are being closed off.

Now none of this applies to anyone in the West, not because we have a Social Welfare system, but because we exported our poverty to other countries. Now our cheap goods are manufactured by cheap labour abroad. The low wages and the subsequent mass scale hand to mouth existence means that entire countries often have little cash to invest in infrastructure at any level.

This is our fault. We buy whatever the fuck we want and we never consider the consequences.

This is business' fault because they lie to us or allow themselves to become so big and cumbersome that they are incapable of ensuring their responsibilities are properly carried out; i.e. they don't know what the truth is.

It is ultimately our fault though. We want stuff because we do. We want it cheap and we want it easy but we probably won't want it any more soon, because times have moved on; there'll be new stuff to want and wanting the old stuff is now considered stupid and a bit weird.

So maybe we need to be a bit fairer. The humans we lock in factories all day so we can have the latest style of (say) cheap crockery are also amazing, so maybe we should buy less crockery but pay more for it, take better care of it give the amazing creatures who make it a reward in keeping with his/her sacrifice of time and freedom so that they can do some amazing things for themselves for a change - because as it it they are working to support our lifestyle and that's not fair.