Post Modern Poverty

The conflict in Mali, the school shooting in Connecticut and theatre shooting in Boulder, the bombings in Pakistan and Iraq, the Arab Spring, and the crazy people who live on skid row and smoke crack all have one thing in common. They are products of poverty. They are not all impoverished as individuals, but the individuals involved are rising up or acting out or tuning out due to some form of poverty. Mali's current state is a result of a weak government. That means people are not getting things like water, electricity, and plumbing without paying bribes and exorbitant fees. Corruption runs a state into the ground. People suffer and violence becomes a viable if not ultimate option. When it comes to those crazed American gunmen, they suffer a poverty of the mind which projects constant fantasy images of killing and death. Not to say that these kind of fantasies are uncommon, and I bet 99% of the dark dreamers do not act. Still these are not unprovoked acts of senseless violence. On to Pakistan. Thats an obvious one. A poor country if there ever was one. India too. Iraq is the product of counter insurgency that was never really bore fruit. From what I understand about counter insurgency campaigns, there is a pretty statistically low chance of them gaining the kinds of success they promise. Gorilla warfare is a rigged game. Its never won or lost when an outside invader does not intend to occupy the territory indefinitely. The Romans understood that, as seemingly do the Israelis. Iraq has the potential to become stable again, but from todays news alone we know that bombs are going off all the time. And I imagine when you see a lot of dismembered bodies it does something to your soul. The crazy people and the drug addicts who are often one in the same, are simply put self-medicating. I know this. A lot of people do it. It comes from being poor, but more importantly from having a poor sense of self. All of these very different situations are related by poverty. If poverty did not exist then none of this would have ever happened. No 9/11. No Nazi Germany. No Civil War. As Axel Rose said, "Whats so civil about it anyway." Civility is what we get when we give up certain individual rights to live as a society. It is in our interest to act as a community, for the alternative is to be alone in the wilderness. If it was the goal of the modern world to eradicate poverty, then modernization has failed. If it is a success, its hard to see it right now. In fact the failure to eradicate poverty has lead to the real crisis of our Post-Modern world. Global warming. War, poverty, and the destruction of the environment are locked in a symbiotic relationship. They all feed each-other. They are correlative. I saved the Arab Spring scenario for last because it is a little different. Like the Civil Rights struggle and the labor struggles in America and the world, the Arab Spring is a deliberate action geared toward bringing people out of poverty and into the Modern/Po-Mo world. It has been warped and hi-jacked by outside interests including the U.S., but it was and continues to be a genuine act of individual self-expression in a constricting and oppressive environment. People felt liberated. They may have a long way to go, but the spirit was there. I am not trying to preach any particular moral code that is superior to all others, but would suggest that a lack of one leads to poverty. We are living on that hungry planet.