First question: Why has no one asked for relief effort, or prayers, or got up in arms about, or even mentioned the oil spill in the south Atlantic? That's right! No one cares about remote African islands. I look at the CNN website at least once a day and never saw a thing about this. It was never breaking news. Apparently, after the Gulf oil leak, 16,000 tons (maybe up to 66,000 tons) of crude oil leaking into the ocean is no big deal. Oh, by the way, the island that the barge wrecked by is home 200,000 rockhopper penguins (more than half the worlds population) 20,000 of which were confirmed "oiled" on March 22nd, the day after the wreck.
Second question: Since when is it ok for police to pepper spray an 8 year old? I posted the link to the news broadcast about this. I had one comment. Sorry, I didn't get the memo that we were living in a police state now.
Third question is more like a statement. It's nice that so many people posted links to tell Congress to ensure military pay in case the government shut down. But, and this is a big but, what about the other 800,000 people who wouldn't have been paid? What about the 10 of thousands of small businesses that rely on government contracts, national parks, etc.? I'm not anti-military by any means, but I think the gesture was a little near sighted. They would have received back pay at least. Unlike the business that may have been permanently shut down or the hundreds of thousands Federal employees who would just have to suffer through it. Having Congress take a pay cut would only be a couple drops in the bucket. Their average salary is $174,000 a year. Yes it's far more than I'll make in the next couple of years, and it's above the average household income, but really, unless you cut their pay in half, it's not going to do much. Even then, it wouldn't accomplish much.
I almost lost sight of my point, which is that we need to open our eyes to the big picture here. That's pretty much it. If we let police brutalize children, ecological disasters go unnoticed, and the government control our lively hood, we need to take a long reflection inward and decide if this is the world we want future generations to inherit.
