Fair is Fair

One Week Since I Posted Here....

You can certainly sing the Barenaked Ladies song, if you must. Me, I was never a huge fan of theirs back when it was new. I did, however, enjoy the Weird Al parody...but that's a story for another day.

“The basement is closed at 11” Fuck that! It's bad enough that the internet connection gets axed at 11:30, but now I'm no longer allowed to write up my blog on this computer up until then? It's but a trifle to type up a second half, and post it as an edit, but should I really have to? I have been living under the assumption that I will be able to go to university and live at home for at least a while, but that seems less and less possible. I know that it's probably for the best, as I will get a lot more sleep this way, but that does not mean that I appreciate it in the least

But enough winging about that, because I promised myself that I would never let my Blog get bogged down with whiny self-pity and the like.

Fortunately...

I have something worthwile to talk about: DOING SOMETHING. Those of you familiar with philosophy (existentialism, in particular) will get a kick out of this URL here. You don't need to sign up to browse a short list of actions (I went this route), so take a gander at it. The long and short of it is that a lot of them are “small acts of kindness”, or even “random acts of kindness”, or simply “easy acts of kindness”. What do you do now? Uh, try 'em out, perhaps? If any sumbitch wanders across that page, and decides that there is no place in their schedule for such superfluous niceness, I want to bitchslap them; we all have the time, we just find it easier to ignore that fact.

At this point, I must also link you to the site from which I linked to the above. At a bus stop today, I happened upon a few of those lovely people who stand out in the cold, for the sole purpose of informing you with some free literature. No, not those Freaky Fanatics with their mini-gospels! These were the happy, orange-clad, Engineers Without Borders types, and they were handing out a ficticious newspaper, dated this day 2025. The headline? “Worldwide celebrations: End of extreme poverty declared”. It may be optimistic, it may be unfeasable...but why say such things? “Extreme poverty” is defined as living on less than $1 per day. There are currently 1.2 Billion people (according to this lovely paper here). You would think that those of us who comprise the other ~5 Billion could scare up AT THE VERY LEAST enough to double that figure. That would cost maybe $300 per person per year. Compare that to tuition of as much as $20K a year (which is, I will grant, more than is strictly necessary, but if you want to go to certain schools, there is a price you pay). It's not a solution that would work all that well, but I meant it as a springboard. For a mere pittance ($7 a week), you could DOUBLE someone's income. Imagine what you could do for that person with some REAL money, and some volunteers, maybe some generous equipment donations. Yes, yes, this is what 'they' have been doing for years...why isn't poverty gone already? Perhaps it's because 'they' have been doing it, and not YOU. After all, if you want something done right...

It might be a small start, but I'm going to see what else besides coffee and chocolate can be bought fair-trade. Nothing tastes better than a fair deal. Nothing. (This is actually true. Fair trade, Organic chocolate is every bit as good as the regular stuff. Sure it costs more, but imagine someone was paying YOU less than $1 a day to break your back working. Fair trade starts to sound a little better, doesn't it?)