Odds

This afternoon, I was looking at some pictures taken in Sri Lanka following the 2004 tsunami. This has been on my mind a lot lately for one big reason. About a week ago, Condoleeza Rice announced we would give $770 million to Lebanon to rebuild after their war last year. It's hard to argue that they don't need it. But they were at war. All the damage was human-induced. And Lebanon is far more developed than Indonesia or Sri Lanka, where we pledged $350 million and haven't delivered it all.

Most Americans, myself included, will probably never see anything like the horrors of either situation, which may render my question naive. Why aren't we doing more for the tsunami victims? These people were mainly fishers, hunters, and subsistence farmers. They don't have bank accounts. They don't have factories full of frozen vegetables or airports where citrus fruit will just be flown in instead of grown locally. Lebanon can recover more easily. People will invest in Lebanon. The population is relatively well-educated, there is a middle class and a financial sector and so many other things Aceh doesn't have. We can not forget the tsunami survivors who need to get their lives back on track.

So the title of this post. No matter how many times I see these numbers, my mind is blown. Sometimes it's really easy to live in a little bubble and have your perception of the world become totally skewed.

1 out of 6 Americans did not finish high school.
Less than 1 of 3 Americans has a college degree.
Less than 1 in 11 Americans has a graduate degree.
1 in 6 Americans has no health insurance.
1 in 8 Americans lives below the federally set "poverty line."

And this is the United States, the largest, most powerful economy in the world. This is changing every day, but only about one percent of the world's population has a college degree. 1 in 5 people in the world live on less than $1 US per day. This ends my winding monologue.

Over the next few days, I'm going to talk about my wristbands. I wear four. Three are related, one is not. I think this is one of the best fads of my lifetime, and it's now over. But I've hung onto mine, I wear them literally all the time, and I believe very deeply in the causes they promote.
Tomorrow: relentless.