Saturday, 22 December 2007 | posted by Ben
General, Guildford 2008, WEF Davos 2008
<Ben steps on personal soapbox>
Thought I would make some comments about the state of affairs in the world, our reaction to it and where do we go from here.
Every time I tune into global news via the net, or tv it seems something is going wrong. Whether global warming, poverty, conflict, foreign policy, resource supply & demand, diseases, third world debt, lack of education or bad governance. Even that sentence doesn't justice to the range of issues and problems to be solved. The sheer enormity of the ills of the world can be tracked minute by minute, commented upon and clicked into, over and around.
In many respects the flow of issues is like a tap, we can turn it off, filter it so only certain issues get through or we could switch on and let the cold flow of reality wake us up out of our comfortable daze. I'm so guilty of filtering the stream and settling for a briefest touch in my locality, in a sense losing the vision of changing the world for the better. The status quo can't be good enough, it wasn't good enough 20th century figures such as Albert Einstein, Mikhail Gorbachev, Tim Berners-Lee, Ronald Reagan, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, Mao Zedong, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Mohandas Gandhi or Nelson Mandela. But perhaps further discussion of leaders, revolutionaries, free thinkers and world changers should be held in the forums.
So we wake the challenge of fixing the world, of selecting achievable short term goals and far reaching long term visions. The people who you need to inspire to action, so that you may inherit the results, will be at the World Economic Forum 08. British Council will facilitate the forum in London but the voice of youth to the issues of the world will be truly yours and it will be preciously carried to Switzerland so that our collective global leaders can hear it and response.
<end soapbox rant>
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Activism CAPs (Community Action Programmes) Climate Economy General Greenwich 2007 Guildford 2008 Guildford 2009 Human Rights News Politics WEF Davos 2008
23 December 2007
I think that the forum is a good start towards an intellectual and realistic discussion about the current problems and challenges that face our world today. The obvious is that today 20% of the world use 89% of all the world resources meaning that their is economical and social inequality caused by high living standards in the Western hemisphere on the expense of those in third world countries. The problem with the current NGO’s and development agency we have today is that they embed colonialist traditions of civilizing the third world countries through what is referred to as the “White Man Burden”. Today on political terms we have a superpower that tries to police the world and ensure the continuous profit of its cooperation’s and other cooperation’s by political intimidation and other methods that severely harm the humanistic relations between both the people in the West and the People in other developing nations.
The forum should provide an original outlook on how to solve at least on of the many issues that you have stated before. Maybe a success of such a kind will empower others around the world with a new vision to rise and start providing solutions rather than opposing everything that has been done.
I am looking forward to meet you all and wish you all a Merry Christmas and Happy new year.