When Charity Is Not Charity
by John Schroeder
There is this really cute story about Jeb Bush and Supergirl. Oh how I wish I could comic geek out on this. (If you think the TV version is “hot,” you have got to check out some of the comic versions) Signs are good Paul Ryan is going to get across the finishing line for Speaker. I wish I could go on a bit about how it should not be nearly as difficult as it has been. Hillary Clinton is going to spend the day bobbing and weaving the day after Joe Biden has left the Democrat party without a back up plan. I wish I could play “bang the bobo doll” on Hillary for a while. But a piece has presented itself this morning that is so chilling in its implications that it needs discussion before any of those stories.
Abortion, same-sex marriage, even the 1001 Clinton scandals seem like signs that the world has lost its moral compass, and they are. But there is a much bigger sign. According to economist Bjorn Lomborg, writing in the Wall Street Journal this morning, many many rich nations and NGO’s now look at the most impoverished places on earth and see not a need for food or medicine, but a need for “green” technology:
In the run-up to the 2015 U.N. Climate Change Conference in Paris from Nov. 30 to Dec. 11, rich countries and development organizations are scrambling to join the fashionable ranks of “climate aid” donors. This effectively means telling the world’s worst-off people, suffering from tuberculosis, malaria or malnutrition, that what they really need isn’t medicine, mosquito nets or micronutrients, but a solar panel.
Lomborg cites some startling numbers ($8.9 billion from the UK alone!) going to these programs. He blames the Copenhagen climate accords of six years ago, and then cites this stunner of a stat, “The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has analyzed about 70% of total global development aid and found that about one in four of those dollars goes to climate-related aid.”
And then he makes his real point, “… this growing emphasis on climate aid is immoral.”
I could not agree more. Billions of dollars going to solar power in areas where people die routinely of curable and preventable disease save for a lack of simple and plentiful medication is more than immoral, it is evil. Apparently we have lost all perspective. Lomborg hits the nail directly on the head on this whole issue with this sentence:
Providing the world’s most deprived countries with solar panels instead of better health care or education is inexcusable self-indulgence.
I have no idea if Lomborg is a man of faith, and if so what faith, but that sentence is one of the most Christian I have ever read. It makes plain the moral heart of the Judeo/Christian ethic – put the needs of the other ahead of your own. That’s the problem with so much of the left’s agenda. At the heart of the abortion issue is the pregnant woman that puts her own desire ahead of the life she carries. Obama puts his own agenda ahead of the nations need to defend itself. Christianity most certainly teaches us the exact opposite way to think about things. God could have saved the world with a word, but instead He saved it with self-sacrifice. This is our example.
The world as we know it cannot survive this onslaught of selfishness. If it continues democracy will break down. The hungry of the world will die of disease and malnutrition in huts lit by solar power with batteries full of toxic chemicals in the corner. The question is how do we change course?
No law, policy or program can change this. Turning back to our example – a man saved the world. A man that was not in government; a man with but a few devoted followers; a man that died a criminals death. If we are to fix what is wrong with this world we have to look not to our leaders but to ourselves. We have to ask if we are men and women like the man that saved the world. We have to focus on the devoted few around us and help them be good people, people like our example. It is not glorious, it is not grandiose and it will not garner us attention or much in the way of praise. But more rapidly than we can imagine it will change the world. And right now, the world has to change.
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