[Skybird]

Morally it's a no-win-situation, whatever option one chooses, it's a looser. Western nations have to accept too great responsebility in the past but also in the present to have pushed foreign people and cultures to where they are right now, and that way noone can say that the West back then and third world today have had the same starting conditions, in terms of preconditions and generally: "fairness".
[This shall not allow to ignore the fact that sometimes foreign people's cultures and history themselves have created factors that negatively feed back on their contemporary status and chances for the future; rigid society structures, for example (Hinduism), or a spiritual climate that does not allow the developement of reason and logic, science and philosophy (Islam), or a code of laws regulating tribal interactions in a way that let's them stagnate, not develope, or embraces them in neverending tribal wars. Africa) ]
But with regard to our owhn history, we nevertheless owe to many of them. But almost every helping effort suffers from corruption, and war parties picking away what they consider to be their share of it. Such interest groups even create "events" to make the aide go flowing again sot hat they can have their income: it's usual business in Africa and parts of Southeast Asia, south America as well. If you give one dollar to a street collector, 20, 30, 50 % of it will end in form of ammunition, weapons and medical supplies for war factions that at the same time gets damned in the world's media at the same time. If you want to help, you have to support massmurderes and wars and massacres that were committed to make you spend money when you see the pictures of unhappy mothers and starving children. Reality does not know cynism - it simply is what it is.

The morality issue becomes even sharper when thinking about if this planet even can afford to allow all people in the world the same ammount of industrialization and material luxury we enjoy ourselves in the West. Consider 1.2 billion Chinese sharing the American lifestyle - that would mean, that waste of ressources and environmental and aerial pollution would rocket straight into the air by multiple factors! Or all African families having the same density of car-owning like european or American societies. And... and... Our Western life style is seriously out of balance. It is of such an absurd and queer quality that we cannot survive if ALL mankind is living to this standard. "They" may have to little. But surely "we" demand too much for ourselves.

Everybody wants to party, but noone wants to clean the kitchen.

The only reasonable longterm perspective I see as valid is that we in the West start manhunting and getting rid of our corrupt, egoist self-declared lying and deeply rotten "elites" in economics and politics and kill the evil selfishness they have implemented in world trade, global arms trade, and economicial exploitation (for example by supporting dictators here and there, or warlords like those that were talked about above - if only they guarantee the flow of needed ressources like uran, diamonds, or whatever.). Our politiccs are based on lies, betrayal and self-deception. How can we expect that ever something good will come from them? they are no solution to the problems, they are the root of it. Kill them, and shed no tear for them.

We also need to rethink if the values will live up to are really reasonable and "valuable". If they have led us to where we are, than obviously something is terribly wrong with them. It is no wisdom to propagate a way of living and a code of ethics that leads us to designing our civilization for ultimate implosive suicide on a materialistically high developed level. It has led us away from what really counts. So it is a wrong way, or we are not still not ripe to handle the fruits of our sowings with the needed sense of responsebility. I always thought that space travelling developed much faster than the evolution of human mind. It gives us no new capacity to solve our problems on a basic level, but gives us the ability only to transport our problems to the stars. We constantly acceölerate, and more and more people get physically and psychologically sick by the mad speed modern life is lived by, and we have develoeped clear destructive symptoms on all levels of communal and individual life. Mayn poorer societies neverthelss paradoxically enjoy a far higher level of mental health than we do. Shouldn't this make us think twice about our self-declared superiority?

What to do for you and me? My answer: help the individual, if you happen to know someone. You can even try to get to know someone in need of help. If you really want to help, there is no esxcuse for you not to find someone in need for help, wether it be far away, or next to your place. Just open your damn eyes. If you want to help, you can find someone who needs help, and you can find him on day one of your search - guaranteed. Do not rely on institututions and organisation and medias, don'T let yourself beeing intimidated by media reports about how big in scale the latest bad event has been, concentrate on the scale of your own life. Don't do it because it makes you feel good, or proud, or because your faith tells you it is a good thing - just do it, and do it for the sake of the one person that receives your help. If you do it because you think of your fate on judgement day, you already have poisened your effort again. Don't try to save the world, but try to save the one next to you. Influence others you happen to know into this direction of thinking. If only enough people would do that, it would change our acting on the higher level of social community: it then would change our politics, our priorities in economy, our hierarchy of ethical values, and so forth.

Nothing else will ever work. Their is no instant-highway to paradise-on-earth.

I am a realist. Of course it will not come this way, I know.

The alternatives given hy Happy Times I only think about as the usual often-thought "reasonable" alibis for not doing anything and keeping all we have for ourselves, never questioning the righteousness of our way of going, or the economical wisdom in it. Business as usual, that means.

Pictures like the one posted by Drebbel are a mirror to me, in which I see the reflected image of ourself's failure, and the dark side of our selfish mind. That women is not a mother in some far away, desperate land. She is the face of your self that you have murdered yourself long time ago.

So look at that picture, and in her eyes recognize yourself.