Win a Trip, and See a Different World

Nick Kristof is one of my all-time favorite writers and people (I've had the honor of meeting him twice).  He should win the Nobel Peace Prize for doing more to raise international awareness of human suffering all over the world than anyone I can think of.

 

This is why we need Obama as President -- he gets this in a way no-one else running does:

That lack of firsthand experience abroad also helps explain why we are so awful at foreign policy: we just don’t “get” how our actions will be perceived abroad, so time and again — in Vietnam, China, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Afghanistan and Latin America — we end up clumsily empowering our enemies.

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Win a Trip, and See a Different World

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Published: March 11, 2007

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/11/opinion/11kristof.html

Cast your eyes above and meet Hidaya Abatemam, whom I met last month in a remote area of southern Ethiopia. She is 6 years old and weighs 17 pounds.

Hidaya was starved nearly to death and may well have suffered permanent mental impairment, helping to trap her — and her own children, if she lives that long — in another generation of poverty.

Yet maybe the more interesting question is not why Hidaya is starving but why the world continues to allow 30,000 children like her to die each day of poverty.

Ultimately what is killing girls like her isn’t precisely malnutrition or malaria, but indifference. And that, in turn, arises from our insularity, our inexperience in traveling and living in poor countries, so that we have difficulty empathizing with people like Hidaya.