Scoots asks a great question

about the middle class and its relation to the poor.

I'm seriously in love with Jimmy Carter.

I watched a video called Carter vs. the Worms on nytimes.com about Jimmy Carter’s efforts to extend human rights in Africa (especially the human right of freedom from disease), and I HIGHLY recommend it.

The video’s sort of persnickety, but if you go to the New York Times' video site here and look for it at the bottom of the page, you should be able to click on and watch it. (If you have a semi-quick internet connection, be sure you set the player to a “high”, or it will come out all jankity.)

And bring on the chocolate!

I'm giving up sweets for Lent, which begins this Wednesday, which is Ash Wednesday. (I know that because I'm an honorary Catholic now.)

I've never given anything up for Lent, but I needed an excuse to give up sweets for a while because I have an unhealthy attachment to them, and the last time I went to the doctor she preached me a sermon about how our metabolism slows as we get older and refined sugar goes right to your waist and blah, blah, blah.

And it seems like a good spiritual discipline. (Plus, the spiritual discipline of fasting just makes me cranky.)

Are you giving up anything for Lent? Why or why not?

What do you think about this?

"If the time comes when despair sees violence as the only possible way, it is because Christians were not what they should have been. If violence is unleashed anywhere at all, the Christians are always to blame. This is the criterion, as it were, of the confession of sin. Always, it is because Christians have not been concerned for the poor, have not defended the cause of the poor before the powerful, have not unswervingly fought the fight for justice, that violence breaks out." ~Jacques Ellul

I'm torn--I think it's true that some people will fight no matter what Christians or any other people do. And yet I also believe that if Christians got together to fight for justice, the world would be a different place. Perhaps a better place.

Does that mean you can blame me for war?

(Regardless, it's not going to stop me from blaming George Bush, that's for sure. . .)

Shit.

34,000 children die every day from hunger and preventable diseases.



Which sentence bothers you more?

Bird Flu & the Poor

Op-Ed Contributor, New York Times
Who Pays to Stop a Pandemic?

By RUTH R. FADEN, PATRICK S. DUGGAN and RUTH KARRON
Published: February 9, 2007

BIRD flu has not yet turned into a pandemic, but it is already killing the meager hopes of some of the world’s poorest people for a marginally better life.

When poultry become infected with the deadly strain of avian influenza (H5N1), it is essential that all birds nearby be culled to prevent further spread. We all stand to benefit from this important pandemic prevention strategy, recommended by the World Health Organization and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. Unfortunately, however, the world’s poor are unfairly shouldering the burden of the intervention.

Last month officials in Jakarta, Indonesia, announced a ban on household farming of poultry there. The domestic bird population of Jakarta is estimated at 1.3 million. Thousands of families were given until Feb. 1 to consume, sell or kill their birds. Now inspectors are going door to door to destroy any remaining birds.

The Indonesian government pledged to pay about $1.50 for each bird infected with the H5N1 virus, a sum that may approximate the bird’s fair market value. But most birds that have been killed under this policy are healthy, so their owners, most reports suggest, will receive nothing.

Moreover, it is not clear how Jakarta’s poor will replace the income they once received from chickens and other birds. When officials impose widespread culling, industrial-scale poultry producers — like the company that owns the large British turkey farm where bird flu was found this month — usually have the resources to absorb the losses. But when the birds of small-scale poultry farmers are culled, entrepreneurs who were just beginning to move up the development ladder can be plunged right back into poverty. The most dependent and vulnerable members of the community become even more dependent and vulnerable. “Backyard birds” are the only source of income for many women and children.

Families whose birds are found to be infected with the virus may suffer even more. People in Cambodia, China and India whose poultry have been blamed for avian influenza outbreaks have often been subject to extreme stigma and isolation, and there have even been reports of suicides by desperate farmers.

It is inevitable that the world’s poor will suffer most from a pandemic. A recent article in The Lancet predicted that if the next pandemic were to mimic the huge 1918 flu outbreak, 96 percent of an estimated 62 million deaths would occur in developing countries. But specific steps can and should be taken now to prevent or mitigate the injustices that are already occurring.

We are part of a group of 24 government officials, public health experts and scientists from 11 countries who recently met in Bellagio, Italy, with the support of the Rockefeller Foundation to call attention to how pandemic planning affects the world’s disadvantaged. We created a checklist for avian influenza control that explicitly calls on the authorities to compensate people who suffer losses from bird-culling programs, regardless of whether the destroyed birds are infected with the avian influenza virus.

Such a program in Jakarta alone would be expensive. Just to compensate families for their culled birds would require nearly $2 million, not including the cost of administering the program. Indonesia’s domestic bird population countrywide is estimated at 300 million, so if the culling program were to be expanded beyond Jakarta, the total compensation cost could run as high as $450 million.

Indonesia’s avian influenza budget for the coming year is reported to be less than $50 million. Clearly, without donor assistance, the government cannot afford to compensate families and farmers fairly. So the burden of pandemic prevention must also fall on the world’s wealthy nations.

Last year, the United States, the European Union and other nations pledged more than $2 billion to the global war chest for avian influenza response. Developing a program to compensate poor families in countries with limited resources is an enormous challenge. But it is time that the money pledged by the donor countries reach the people who are already the first victims of the next pandemic.

Ruth R. Faden is the executive director and Patrick S. Duggan is the research coordinator of the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics. Ruth Karron is the director of the Center for Immunization Research at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Wow. That's quite the turn around.

Ousted Pastor ‘Completely Heterosexual’
By NEELA BANERJEE
Published: February 7, 2007, New York Times

Forced by a gay sex scandal to resign as president of the National Association of Evangelicals, the Rev. Ted Haggard now feels that after three weeks of intensive counseling, he is “completely heterosexual,” says an overseer of the megachurch Mr. Haggard once led.

The church official, the Rev. Tim Ralph, said in an interview published yesterday by The Denver Post that Mr. Haggard had also told the board of overseers that his only sexual relationship involving another man had been with Michael Jones, the onetime Denver prostitute who exposed that three-year affair last fall. Mr. Jones said then that he was making it public because Mr. Haggard had acted hypocritically in promoting a constitutional amendment to bar same-sex marriage.

Mr. Haggard, who as a result of the scandal was ousted by the overseers in November as senior pastor of New Life Church in Colorado Springs, broke a three-month silence over the weekend when he contacted members of the church by e-mail to tell them that he was healing.

His three weeks of counseling, in Phoenix, felt like “three years’ worth of analysis and treatment,” but now “Jesus is starting to put me back together,” Mr. Haggard wrote in the e-mail message, which was published in The Colorado Springs Gazette on Monday.

“I have spent so much time in repentance, brokenness, hurt and sorrow for the things I’ve done and the negative impact my actions have had on others,” he said.

Mr. Haggard could not be reached for comment yesterday. Mr. Ralph declined through a spokeswoman to comment, and there was no response to telephone calls and e-mail to another overseer or to a New Life spokesman. But Mr. Ralph told The Denver Post that Mr. Haggard had come out of the counseling convinced of his heterosexuality.

“He is completely heterosexual,” Mr. Ralph told The Post, adding that Mr. Haggard’s homosexual activity had not been “a constant thing.”

Dr. Jack Drescher, a New York psychiatrist who is an expert on issues of gender and sexuality, said that while it was people’s prerogative to identify their sexual orientation as they wanted, the notion of being able to change that orientation was “not consistent with clinical presentations, but totally consistent with theological belief.”

“Some people in the community that Mr. Haggard comes from believe homosexuality is a form of behavior, a sinful form of behavior based on certain things in the Bible, and they don’t believe you can create a healthy identity based on sinful behavior,” Dr. Drescher said. “So they define it as a behavior that can be changed, and there is this thinking that if you control those behaviors enough, heterosexual attractions will follow.”

Mr. Haggard said in his message to New Life members that he and his wife were taking online courses to get master’s degrees in psychology, and Mr. Ralph told The Post that the oversight board had recommended to Mr. Haggard that he take up secular work.

I've got it!

Maybe my new spiritual gift is jumping. I'm apparently pretty good at it.

Daily Emails

I was cleaning out my inbox today, and found responses to some emails I'd written to some college buddies. Thought they might interest you. I apologize that they don't come with a cool Strongbad song.

About the new singles small group I joined through another church in the area:
The biggest news in my life currently is that my small group leader asked me to take attendance on Sunday nights. I guess this means I am an official member, and that I really have to be committed to attending now. Apparently, they asked another girl to do attendance before me, but then they figured out that it would be a better use of her spiritual gifts to coordinate our meal every week. (I agree, she’s a "take charge kinda gal" and seems to have great organizational skills, which makes her perfect for the job.) I guess, then, that means that my gift is attendance taking? I was really hoping on having some other kind of spiritual gift. I mean, I USED to have some other spiritual gifts. . .but I’m not sure that I have them anymore. Can you lose spiritual gifts? And then gain really boring new ones in their place?

I think, too, the people in the small group aren’t really sure how to handle me. The girls know that I did foot care and lived in the inner city for a year, which generally makes people assume that I am either really holy or really weird. (And let’s be honest--I am SO much closer to really weird.) I have a hard time coming up with things to talk about with all the group members, because I am trying to hide my flaming liberal-ness, at least for a while. I mean, you don’t give away all your quirks on a first date, right? So I think I either come off as bland because I'm introverted and people don’t know about my inner-city stuff, or holy/weird because they do. I think I am probably expecting too much too soon, but it doesn’t really feel like “home” to me, y’know? I want to have a group of people who really understands where I’ve been and the things I learned/believe because of it and who can support me in figuring out how to live my life as this person who is totally different from who she was three years ago. Maybe that’s just expecting too much in general, and I should be happy that perhaps I’m making friends with people who can go to the movies with me. Or maybe none of that can happen until I fess up to my flaming liberal-ness. I dunno.

About dating:
In other news, I made this deal with myself on my last birthday that if I was still single by my next birhtday, I’d start internet dating. (And then I hoped really hard that I wouldn’t be single on my next birthday because, really, who wants to internet date?) With my next birthday getting closer every day (and no interesting men in sight), I think I’ve changed my mind. The more I think about it, the more I realize that there are only so many hours in a day, and I only have so much time to devote to certain things in my life (and I already devote more to TV than I probably should). So why waste time going out on dates with stupid, scary men? It would make for some good stories, I’m sure, but I think I already have more than my share of good stories, at least where my love life is concerned. No, it seems more useful to devote my extra time to volunteering somewhere. I still tutor /play with kids at the afterschool program run by my church every other week, but it doesn’t seem like enough. Besides, I’d rather be known as someone who worked to make a difference than someone who had a lot of dates. (And, you know, as an added bonus, this means I get out of internet dating.) So now I’m looking for some other volunteer sites that will make me feel useful, like I have another purpose in life than getting up and going to work in the morning.

And about dating again:
I don't know, I blame culture and the church for teaching us that the only way we can be happy is if we are married. I mean, how many chick flicks have we seen that preach that message? And doesn't the church do a horrible job of meeting singles' needs? They're all about sermons on marriage and how to stay married, but how to be a good single seems to fall through the cracks somehow. And yet we grew up with all these sermons against divorce. So we're left with the message that we won't be happy until we're married, and we have to stay that way, so we'd better do a good job of picking a husband. That's a huge burden to carry, and I think that makes us put a lot of pressure on the beginning of the relationship. I mean, why waste time if he isn't "the one"? So we (at least those of us who are control freaks like me) want to know as soon as possible if he's the one, so if he's not, we can get on to finding one who's better. And I think as you get older, the amount of guys to choose from shrinks, so you feel increasing pressure with each year to find him and find him fast. But I don't think there's anything wrong with wanting to know if a guy will be a good husband and father. That's important stuff to know. My problem is that I want fireworks and a flashing neon sign on the first date, and that doesn't always happen. In fact, I think it probably hardly ever happens.