Pat Oliphant for August 13, 2011

And if we send food the warlords steal it or make the people pay for it. If we send troops to clean them out then they say we are interfering. Don’t ask why God allows this to happen. Ask the stupid lawyers and politicians.

Lawyers and politicians are the problem. Just look at Haiti..those people are still living in tents and plastic tarps after all the millions collected to help them by Clinton, Bush and others. The money is sitting in a bank in New York and won’t be disbursed until it can be assured the Haiti politicians won’t steal it. Well, that will never happen and those in charge know this, so the banks just keep making profits off the interest…along with their buddies. Same thing in Somalia….most of the aid goes to “those in charge”.

The problem here is those in need are not sitting outside your window at the restaurant. They are far away, so you give your relief money to the “middle man” who is only too happy to pass along 1%…..if the starving people are lucky enough to get the crumb. Blame the politicians and the lawyers who filter the money……………

@kreole, @ladyfingers86: Both issues are a problem. If we’re really honest with ourselves, we’re very spoiled. . . and so is Europe. But there are generous people here, and much of that generosity is being held up in red tape. One reason why I’ve never trusted lawyers and government to handle things like this. . . they never act fast enough to make a real difference.

TowerWarlock and Sonny1 are correct. Don’t guilt the West for this tragedy. We tried and all we got was BlackHawk Down. Somali gangs strip their own infrastructure for loot. Their Pirates hijack commercial ships at sea. Whose young son or daughter in our military are you willing to risk being killed and dragged through the streets as a trophy? Let the French, the Brits, the Germans, or someone else take a turn be a crusader, and stop asking America to have more of its sons and daughters die in some hellhole. We’re suffering enough fighting for dubious causes in the Middle east

as long as Africa averages 7.8 children per couple there will always be famines and war because the land won’t support the crush of people and the food given simply guarantees yet another famine in the near future

^ Towerwarlock, sonny1 & Beenthere et al Washing their hands. It’s good hygiene when one is about to partake in one’s meal. :-| Doing pretty much what the cartoon is about.

Arguing for apathy and indifference as a strategy because solutions aren’t as simple as we’d like is ridiculous. You don’t avoid doing the right thing because there’s hard work involved, regardless of circumstances. Jesus didn’t beg off his responsibility because there was death involved. Christianity and self-sacrifice aren’t buffets from which we pick and choose.

dont hold yer breath. there probably arent more than 3 christians in somalia, and theyre probably running for their lives. also, should the USA ever descend into a similar chaos, i seriously doubt there would a surge of generosity to come to our aid. probably planetary smugness, if not.

The late great comedian Sam Kinison had the right idea in one of his bits––don’t send them food, send them U-hauls to move away from the desert. “It’s a desert, food doesn’t grow there!” he said.

Jesus Christ said, “The poor will always be with you.” That applies to the United States of America also. It is a shame, but have you got a better idea without breaking the US economy?

Somalia is a desert country of drought, made worse (their worst in 60 years) by climate change. Flying over Texas the other day, noted all the dried up lake beds encrusted with salts, dead grass, etc. WE are looking at serious problems here at home with drought and climate change, period. It isn’t the lack of aid or empathy in America, but the lack of intelligence, and fanatic grasping at ignorance and isolation. Looking at the “right” today, especially the “religious right”, I’ve never seen more people committed to being WRONG and empty-headed. Eisenhower talked of caring for others, fair taxation (91% max in his day), and the good of the nation, while assuring that profit didn’t deprive people of their rights under the Constitution. That is NOT the “Republican” party of today. We’ve lost a lot of common sense on the Democratic side as well, no challenge there, but it IS a matter of perspective. Somalia is far away, has a history of tragedy associated with natural disasters, and political disasters, which WE have fomented over the years because of its strategic location at the horn.

sorry, but the pissants above have proven they’re no longer in contact with any reality, or sensitivity to life, human or otherwise, and THAT is their tragedy the rest of us must avoid, and prevent from spreading.

Don’t waste your bandwith. Vortex is jealous of people living on food stamps!

Yesterday I watched a documentary on the French Revolution, they told how Marie-Antoinette ate exotic pastries, wore expensive dresses and jewels, drank champagne while people had nothing to eat…Meanwhile, mom watched Masterchef Australia. They showed a tv audience of overworked mothers how to cook an egg so the yolk is precicely in the middle (somehow it’s not edible if it isn’t in the middle), how to measure a cake before you cut it, how to frost it so it looks like a magazine picture and my nephew watched Epic meal time on YouTube.Then I thought about the famine and went back to my French Revolution decumentary. It gave me the creeps.

DamSpotGood cartoon, but there are many people in this country living in tunnels and sewers who aren’t using the system and are being told to go dumpster diving for nutrition.

while eating breakfast in bom bay i could enjoy the sight of the dead in the gutter.

ah the policies of the imf/world bank….what the "echos’ call “appropriate technology”, (IE: use a stick- you can’t have a tractor—might harm the insects or flora), no way out =cept inferred ZPG, “too many people” shout the rich! no where to ride my horsey…. ADD, religious Fundy’s, of ALL stripes, war lords , blow out the UN …well…. what ya got? an “echo” nightmare of green world bank development.coming soon- hillary’s PAID with U$D Pakistani troops, used for CFR interests to ‘settle" or calm down, local Muslim govs and peoples…. pretty slick, using their troops…..she’s in line to be knighted for her fine work for womyn and the crowns interests.

I wonder whether dfowensby knows the origin of Xubuntu…It’s based on the Ubuntu flavour of Linux, developed in….South Africa.It is a Zulu/Xhosa word describing a Southern African philosophy about humanity towards others. Its meaning obviously lost to dfowensby

This could be a classic. I can see it in future school books. It goes right in and stays there.

bucyrus “As long as Africa averages 7.8 children per couple there will always be famines and war because the land won’t support the crush of people and the food given simply guarantees yet another famine in the near future.”

Not that simple. Where infant/juvenile mortality is high, birthrates are high to increase the odds that some of the couple’s offspring survive to adulthood. Of course, if your statistic already takes that into account, and your average adult African has 5+ surviving siblings, it’s news to me.

Relocation’s hardly an answer. The death rate if the starving Somalis become refugees would be about the same as if they stay put. Those sanctuaries to which they could make their own way are hardly better off than themselves, and hardly able to absorb them. Getting them to places which could afford to take them in would be the MOST expensive solution, and of course when they get there they’d be despised immigrants.

Of course, in 1729 Jonathan Swift offered a Modest Proposal for dealing with a similar predicament, but I don’t think anybody’s ever actually tried implementing it. No doubt some of y’all would consider it a cheap and effective – and therefore attractive – solution.

Of course, the most cost-effective course is to do nothing at all. Zero dollars or effort with zero result = 100% efficiency. And we can always find ample justification for that; some (like keechum) can even cite scriptural authority.

re freewillYou see, starving Somalis were put on this earth to test us, our freewill. Btw, frtizoid excellent post.

Eryx, " In thousands of neighborhoods across this country, the cheapest food is junk. Fresh produce is non-existent." Last week in Florida I heard basically the same statement at a Publix that I heard here in my local Safeway store: “I’d like to by fresh fruit and produce, but I just can’t afford it.” In a supposedly “well off” retirement area, as well as a"working class" community- “near poverty” is rampant in this nation, and the “under-employed” is a serious problem, created mostly by the elimination of our job market, and internal national “wealth” by shoving all the income upward. “Investment” is indeed good for the economy, but if it isn’t invested here at home, it’s not good for the nation.

Thanks, omQ R.

A couple of afterthoughts and omissions:

“Getting them to places which could afford to take them in would be the MOST expensive solution, and of course when they get there they’d be despised immigrants.” Sadly, this might also be the case with their nearest neighbors, or even if those in the hardest-hit regions within Somalia relocated into areas of (relative) prosperity. Tribalism is pernicious and pervasive, whether the distinctions are small or great. Which leads me to…

Number Twelve: "Sorry, but the United States must take care of their own… Many who disagree with this cartoon would ALSO disagree with THAT: “Why should my tax dollars pay for food stamps, or public health, or public schools? I’M not poor, and if YOU are it’s your own fault.” On the other hand, it’s a reality that the difference between “It’s a pity, but what can be done?” and “It’s an outrage, and we must do something!” is often one of distance. A neighbor who loses his job will likely arouse more compassion in the average person than a devastating earthquake in a country s/he can’t even find on a map. But Terence said “I am a human being, and nothing human is alien to me.” Or, as Harry Tuttle said, “We’re all in this together!”

re tribulations You’d be surprised how often I heard a version of this while growing up. Including my 8th/9th grade art teacher, who was in charge of the SCA – Student’s Christian Association. :-|

“We could always ‘bomb’ the refugee camps with food.”

Without a ground presence, it wouldn’t work. Even in refugee camps (unsurprisingly), the relatively strong will prey upon the weak.

that was me! looking in windows in sacto, CA 1996 homeless, no job, (men not allowed to work), and hungry…petey wilson types eating large. I moved to midwest and got back to work… these people stuck in Africa. sum food getting thru via UN.

Ron Paul is not an anarchist. He’s for minimum government, All those things you listed would be up to the states and countries to provide for, and not the Feds, who are running this country into the ground with debt. IF we would cut back from our military and eliminate wasteful Fed agencies we could save a trillion bucks to keep some of our current social programs going for a while. You cannot have guns and butter. The US does not have infinite wealth.

On the contrary, you MUST have BOTH guns and butter. But it’s true that the more you spend on one the less is available for the other, so a balance must be struck.

For generations, we’ve been perfectly willing to spend our “gun” money overseas rather than here, to amounts in the trillions of dollars. Surely we can afford to slice off a portion of that to alleviate suffering.

ahab, I’ve read the same thing, but it wasn’t limited to Third World countries. In impoverished American communities, children of a single mother are more likely to do well if the maternal grandmother is present. In fact, a “mother/mother’s-mother” household is in many ways better off (for child development) than a “mother/father” household.

And maybe we are tribulations for someone else, a test for someone else.

What god?

Now that it has been established that someone else is to blame for this problem (tons of finger pointing and passing the buck). Does that mean we are relieved of any moral obligation to help these poor people?