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[linnea]

This is hard for me to get across.  Alright, if you feed the people at the salvation army, or volunteer for the Not For Sale movement or whatever, there are still people that are hungry and enslaved. 

So you're saying that it's pointless to try to help alleviate suffering unless you can make certain that none of the planet's 6.6 billion people are hungry or enslaved? I don't know about you, but I'd feel damn guilty living such a privileged American life if I was sitting around rationalizing why I was a lazy fug who didn't lift a finger to help those less fortunate.

I think that folks are too complacent in the US to stage any kind of large scale revolution. We have more people voting in the American Idol than in the presidential elections, for fuck's sake. The only time shit has ever gotten done is when a small group of committed citizens have gotten off their asses and started working for change. You're never going to see the American populace as a whole giving half a shit for those less fortunate.

Jough: the Not For Sale group did recon work to figure out hotspots in the SF area for human trafficking, then they mapped it, then they sent in hidden cameras and filmed all the transactions to gather evidence. Then they went to shelters, advocacy groups, and churches to garner infrastructure to help support the victims once they were freed from the traffickers. If they had just gone straight to the police, the 15 year old Vietnamese girls who were enslaved in the "acupuncture centers" would have been arrested for prostitution and for being illegal aliens. The police would have explained that they simply had no money and no way to care for these people, which is why the NFS people realized that they had to cover all the bases to make sure these people didn't get re-victimized. They took this mountain of evidence to the DA's office, who was stunned that a bunch of activists had done all this work. Then the DA got the police involved and they started carrying out stings and rescuing people.

That's hardly vigilante justice, and I'm sorry that your life is poorer for having spent 20 seconds on their website. Also sorry if this post rates a "tl, dr" from you.

[jough]

I had to look up "tl, dr" but I guess it proves that I skimmed read your entire post.

So you probably think I'm a bad person for not really caring that much about the Vietnamese girls.  I mean, I like Vietnamese girls in general.  My future sister-in-law is Vietnamese.  But for these particular girls - it's a shame, and if they put it to a vote I'd vote for devoting more resources to ending domestic kidnapping and slavery than we spend on say, killing brown people abroad, but otherwise these things are pretty far off my radar, or rather, much lower down than other things that top my list of things on which to focus my energy, like curing cancer or teaching Shakespeare in the public schools.

Someone called me a fascist the other day because when asked "If you could cure AIDS and Ulysses (James Joyce's book) would no longer exist, would you do it?" and I said no, because Ulysses is more important than the lives of a few tens of thousands.  I put it in the context of The Greater Good, but Activist Girl couldn't conceive of art being more important than a single life (let alone the lives of thousands) but I say that art benefits millions, and therefore, well, you get the idea.

[theinevitable]

yeah. Um, I've had that argument before. I was basically told that I was a Nazi.

[linnea]

I had to look up "tl, dr" but I guess it proves that I skimmed read your entire post.

So you probably think I'm a bad person for not really caring that much about the Vietnamese girls.  I mean, I like Vietnamese girls in general.  My future sister-in-law is Vietnamese.  But for these particular girls - it's a shame, and if they put it to a vote I'd vote for devoting more resources to ending domestic kidnapping and slavery than we spend on say, killing brown people abroad, but otherwise these things are pretty far off my radar, or rather, much lower down than other things that top my list of things on which to focus my energy, like curing cancer or teaching Shakespeare in the public schools.

Someone called me a fascist the other day because when asked "If you could cure AIDS and Ulysses (James Joyce's book) would no longer exist, would you do it?" and I said no, because Ulysses is more important than the lives of a few tens of thousands.  I put it in the context of The Greater Good, but Activist Girl couldn't conceive of art being more important than a single life (let alone the lives of thousands) but I say that art benefits millions, and therefore, well, you get the idea.

Your logic does not carry. Where did you get the idea that prosecuting criminals who run organized crime takes money away from curing cancer or Shakespeare?  And yeah, I already got the picture that most Americans are too comfortable with pounding down fast food and watching TV to spend much time worrying about bad shit that happens to brown people.

[jough]

I have only so much money, and so many hours in the say, my dear, and there's still some Shakespeare I haven't read yet.

[Golfhaus]

Jough, would you consider yourself a Social Darwinist? My sister fits the description to the letter, and this all sounds familiar.

I totally agree with the sentiment that a lot of people will make a $2 donation to some organization and feel like they've really Done Something to help the cause. It's like the people who buy all those (Red) things. "Do I spend money on something for me, or to help fight AIDS? Now, I don't have to make that choice!"

[smick]

yeah. Um, I've had that argument before. I was basically told that I was a Nazi.

Look, you're not a nazi just because you felt that the world needed lampshades made out of... oh...

[theinevitable]

the argument was about Joseph Pulitzer, who got a really large amount of Modern art for the St Louis Art Museum from Central Europe at bargain-basement prices in the late 30's. Arguably he didn't know it had been stolen from Jews?
The debate was whether you Pay the Nazis to save important art.

[smick]

the argument was about Joseph Pulitzer, who got a really large amount of Modern art for the St Louis Art Museum from Central Europe at bargain-basement prices in the late 30's. Arguably he didn't know it had been stolen from Jews?
The debate was whether you Pay the Nazis to save important art.

Obviously, the answer is yes, you do, but then you do something with the art that will make the Nazi's really unhappy.

[pmcd9]

Obviously, the answer is yes, you do, but then you do something with the art that will make the Nazi's really unhappy.

Make bombs out of it and drop it on their cities?

[littlefallsmets]

Do what you can when you can, that's your responsibility. My responsibility. Anyone's.

We have to make sure we can get through to tomorrow first, of course, or else we're none of us worth a damn but...

We have to be at peace with the fact that we can only bleed so much for any woman, for any man, for any group of women or men and... yes... there's only so much we have to bleed even for ourselves.

We do what we can, fix that which we are equipped to fix, equipped to see, equipped to comprehend...

And hope that the human race is large enough and talented enough where between the six billion of us, we are possibly equipped each of us to fix at least one other person's endless troubles.

Something like soulmates in the face of this confusion.

That from our abilities, we have the capacity to fulfill at least one other person's needs and for our needs, someone else with a capacity.

That if we all just found the right thing to bleed for, all else would cancel out entirely.

We do what we can and beyond that, we can only hope.

It's okay. No god to ever throw bolts down from the sky could ever expect more of you than what you're capable of.

No person either.

[AlohaDawg]

This has evolved into a really interesting thread.

I believe that there is a whole lot more moral outrage out there than action, so the actions that people took in SF to go after these traffickers and do the right thing for the victims is a great thing, for many reasons. The most important reason is that it takes communities self-policing to rid themselves of unwanted or undesirable activities. It takes a rational government monitoring to make sure the crazies don't get together and run amok over legal, ethical, moral activities.

The issue often becomes the intersection of the unwanted/undesirable and the legal/moral/ethical. Great social change is often the result of catastrophe as was pointed out - the Depression led to the New Deal, AIDS changed a lot of peoples minds about sexual values and mores - but in in the absence of a visible, palpable and potentially (or really) personally costly outcome, it takes a few dedicated people a long time to input the amount of energy it takes to make a difference.

I believe that as Americans, we are bombarded with news and images from everywhere every day. So much of it becomes background noise to many people - not because they are uncaring or callous, but to some degree I think we just block out the endless noisy fugue going on around us. And I think many don't have both the deep seated and healthy values required to latch on to and hold onto an issue to the point of taking personal action - or lack the time, energy, resources, or how-to knowledge to make it go. And, we are an excuse-making society, and unfortunately many make excuses both for themselves and for others, not to mention forgetting that todays exploited migrants and immigrants are a lot like the people that came to the US to become our Grandparents or Great-Grandparents.

[smick]

Absolutely, Aloha.   

We don't have the resources of Angelina Jolie to go and taking on these issues with a camera team and amazing breasts.  The majority of us, we want things fixed, we want the world to be an amazing place, but if we take our eyes off of the ball and focus all our energy on these huge problems... well, The Bank still wants their mortgage check, and the Boss would prefer you to be working on his problems between 9am and 5pm.

So far the best fix I've been able to come to, personally, is to try to live my life in a way that leaves less of a mark on things, and to donate to causes that I hope are worthy of it.   I used to donate my time to a community radio station as well, since I felt that media democracy and giving voices to people who need them was at the very root of the problems.   We spent most of our time fighting the FCC trying to remain on the air.   I pretty much gave that up when I moved. 

[littlefallsmets]

There's an extent to which this becomes part of the Big Brother versus the Big Cloud of Bees theory.

When we are up against One Thing, one well-defined thing, one enemy, one goal, one idea... people are really good at fixing things.

But when we're being stung in ten thousand ways from ten thousand tiny directions, we kind of have no idea what to do.

We freeze up, we flail unthinkingly and get stung all the more.

All these Terrible Things happening and even if there were a rational way to overcome any one of them, how do we choose?

How do we have any right to choose?

We all become Jesus suffocated by the lepers, no matter how much we want to help, no matter how much we're able.

[theinevitable]

Obviously, the answer is yes, you do, but then you do something with the art that will make the Nazi's really unhappy.

part of the issue is that it was Modern Art, and as such, the Germans thought it was degenerate bullshit.

also: I read an interesting article lately about the Swarm of Bees thing. it posited that the reason people like Bill Gates are so good at philanthropy in a smart way is that... they are a little bit socially dumb. They think about things in terms of numbers, not in terms of Human Impact. And, sometimes, thinking about things that way can be really good.