A head line caught my eye this morning as I was perusing the morning news.
Eastern Congo is stuck in a rut of violence, and the United Nations is concerned that donors and Western Governments are getting tired of the steady stream of bad news that spews out of this vast nation.
Oh really? Then why don’t you do something about it?
My mum once said to me something along the lines of.. my whole life i’ve never understood why children still die of diarrhea in some countries. She’s passed that concern onto me. It makes no sense. The amount of food that goes to waste in the western world is shameful. Positively shameful. I have some friends who I can’t handle eating in a restaurant with because of how much food they throw out. But for the most part, people don’t think anything of it. Obesity in the western world is becoming an epidemic and yet children elsewhere die from hunger.
It’s a whole continent away right? Who cares? (sigh)
In environmental news, the oil spill in Louisiana contnues to leak horrifc amounts of oil into the gulf.
Some are hoping to see a silver lining to this dark oily cloud. If the right forces can be marshaled to educate the country on what is really happening, and what the effects really are for the people facing this threat, there might yet be some hope for us.
The bitter catch is that the same people who are living in danger of this spill, are the same people who have been rebuilding their lives after the disastrous effects of Hurricane Katrina. Small coastal towns and fishermen who lost everything are at risk to lose it all again.
The blame game has begun in which BP points the finger at Transocean who ran the rig, while others are looking at Haliburton for their involvement in construction. There’s a lot of speculation about what could have cause the blow out, though official inquiries have not yet begun. This article goes over some of the possibilities, while making an interesting observation about what information BP is withholding.
First of all, it’s likely that BP knows precisely what occurred. According to this 2002 article in Offshore, the Deepwater Horizon was set to be outfitted with a system called E-drill, which continuously beams data from rig operations to a monitoring center in Houston. This data is certainly logged. Until BP and Transocean show what they know, we’re left with a lot of speculation.
I’ve read that Obama has put any new off shore drilling on hold until after the investigation. Of course, my thoughts are, this is a no brainer! We should be DONE with off shore drilling. Like I was saying above, let’s hope this mobilizes enough support to put an end to off shore drilling once and for all.
Before I get too ranty about oil, let’s move along to a very sad and intense article I read today on Rabble about the starting number of inmates in Canada who have HIV or Hep C.
Canadian prisons are the epicentre for HCV and HIV in this country. Prisons lie along the tension-filled fault line of two social tectonic plates: inmate culture — a hard-edged environment that includes violence, despair and drugs — and a prison system that has failed to implement adequate measures to help reduce the risk transmitting the viruses. The consequence is rates of HCV that epidemiologist estimate to be at least 20 times higher in the prison than the general Canadian population, and rates of HIV that are 10 to 20 times higher.
This kind of article is hard to talk to people about because there are too many people who have a preconceived notion of inmates. Yes, there are some truly bad guys there, but there are also a lot of men (and women) who have fallen on hard times, into drugs and end up in jail, getting lost in the system.
One important factor I was not aware of was the ban of tobacco in prison. Cigarettes have long been used as a form of currency in prison. With the ban on smokes, the increase in tensions, a whole new power struggle has emerged.
Meanwhile, insiders say the fallout from the 2008 ban on tobacco in prisons has led to an increase in high-risk activities, and proposed federal legislative changes that restrict prisoner rights will only increase tension levels within the institutions.
Most people have zero sympathy for inmates, but as someone who has witnessed the effects of nicotine withdrawal, (not personally but I’ve had quite a few family members who used to smoke or who are still smoking), I understand how hard it must be to be completely cut off. I’m sure tempers on the best of days are easily flared, let alone the tempers of someone nic’ing out. I think what’s important to remember, is that these are human beings, who for various reasons made bad choices in life. The whole point of prison is supposed to be (or so i thought), for rehabilitation, and once their time is served, an introduction back into contributing to society. But what I’ve seen reflected in the attitudes of those I converse with, it’s more thought of as a place to lock away everything unsightly. I like how one of the Doctors in the article phrased it;
“When you mention prisons, the first thing people think of is Paul Bernardo or Clifford Olson, but the vast majority of inmates are chronic addicts and so many have been abused as children,” says Diane Smith Merrill, an HIV/AIDS outreach worker who visits the eight prisons in the Kingston, Ontario, area.
Before we judge, let’s walk a life time in their shoes.
I don’t have time to mention what else I’ve been reading about so I’ll leave it here.
What you’re thinking about!