Thought of the Day
Maybe one day the world will be a place like the United States where despite the differences the States have in geography, culture, and ideals we will still be proud to identify as human beings who love the Earth as one. My Martin Luther King memento thought.
The State of the Union is today and it got me thinking about how the Earth is structured.
Billionaires and the Plebeians
For instance there are only about 1600 billionaires yet the top 83 or so have more money than the bottom 50% of the world.
An article in the guardian delves out the information by how much money those with too much money has. Something that got at me was that a good portion of the American billionaires inherited their money.
http://www.theguardian.com/money/blog/2014/nov/02/how-many-billionaires-in-the-world
The Hungry vs. the Decadent
Also about 800 million people in the world are hungry. So while less than 2000 have more money than well over half the population. Almost 10% of the people can not even eat.
http://www.wfp.org/hunger/stats
Who Will Pay for Good Ideas
As I’m writing this the State of the Union is on in the background and good ideas about how to progress as a people of a nation. The problem has never been ideas but people willing to put them in action and to come up with a plan to pay for them. We will see how some of these ideas shape up. The GOP response on Fox News is hilarious. It makes no sense why the parties simply fight each other. ObamaCare is in its infancy and is showing good signs yet is an example of a failed policy. I digress I’ll talk about the State of the Union another day once I am able to read it not simply listen to a great orator.
The Diversity but Unity of American as a Template for the Future Unity of the World?
The United States of America is a weird place to be patriotic in. It started off as a collection of very different states with very different cultural identities and industries that were organized more as a loose alliance than a country. The loose confederacy did not work and eventually the government was structured to be more centralized.
Now we exist as not only a collection of different states with different cultures and industries but of different races and religions and any other divisive attributes humans have for each other. Yet we still identify as Americans and love the country as one.
