Foreign Aid

I have been hearing a lot of tea party members and republicans calling for an end to foreign aid because the US is so hard up right now. I agree that a lot of foreign aid is wasted and given out for a lot of wrong reasons. Giving aid including arms to insurgents in countries the US doesn't like is a common example of misguided aid. That has happened all over the world from Cuba to Afghanistan. I would like to see that "foreign aid" stopped.

However, large portions of the world's poorest areas that are in serious need of aid like Somalia (29,000 children starved there recently due to a major ongoing drought) or the area around Northern Democratic Republic of the Congo near Rwanda and Burundi (a forty year plus long war going on where women are being raped and mutilated as a form of genocide), Sudan (another long running war with starving masses) and there are many more areas around the world in serious need of help just to survive.

Somalia is in the news lately because of the drought there. Thousands of men women and mostly children are starving there right now. It is in extremely bad shape with no real government but rather a bunch of vicuous warlords running their own horrendously violent anarchistic self centered fiefdoms. The world is mostly ignoring this. The small amount of aid arriving there mostly through the United Nations is frequently stolen by the warlords instead of going to the starving people. The warlords then use the food to lure starving children into their armies to strengthen their position in the scramble for power in Somalia.

The US weakly tried to intervene in Somalia a few years ago but the warlords shot down a couple helicopters and the US quickly pulled out. I do not expect them to try again because the American people just don't care.

I doubt if very many Americans have ever seen a starving child. South Park just makes fun of them and that is about as close as Americans get to understanding the plight of a starving child. Sure there have been ads on TV since I was a kid showing pictures of needy kids that you can save for 17 cents a day or whatever the going rate is today. But Americans do not seem to have any empathy when they see those ads. Some people must be sending in cash because they are expensive ads to run so I am not saying no Americans care. I am mostly talking about the government when I say Americans do not care.

I was in Ethiopia during the war and drought there back in the 70s. Mothers tried to give me their starving limp silent babies to save them. I was overwhelmed by the reality of the suffering going on. I could not take their babies then and have harbored guilt about it ever since. I give money to UNICEF regularly but that is a drop in the bucket. So I am not much different than the average American. I wish I could help more.

I was also in Zaire when the fighting and genocide was going on. I saw truckloads of stinking dead bodies being carried to mass graves. The people were killed mostly by machetes and mutilated at the same time. It was and still is a gross war. Today there is less large scale open warfare but instead they are raping as a form of genocide (by raping I mean raping women and girls so hard that they become infertile). This has been going on for decades and the world doesn't seem to care at all. Very little aid is going on there.

Sudan has recently been broken up into two countries but that has not yet ended the genocide there either. Again warlords there have used violence and starvation to gain power over their little areas at the cost of thousands of lives. The world has done little to help.

These are just some of the places where foreign aid could help out. To deny these areas assistance when they are in such desperate need is not defensible with the argument that America is too needy to be able to afford to help. Americans just do not know what needy really is with all the overweight children and adults here. Starving here means they haven't eaten a 1500 calorie meal in over three hours.

Just think about this is all I ask and if you can help please do. Please, also let your government know you want them to help these people too. Stand up against these selfish tea party members and republicans that inhumanely want to ignore this problem. America can afford to help and should be doing it already.

Thanks PURAVIDA