getting shit in perspective

COMMENT

Yesterday we were all glued to the box as powerful people were brought to book over the failings of their subordinates (or so they would have us believe). But an aid worker speaking on this morning's Today Programme brought us back to Earth. Everyone was obsessed, he said, with a shaving-cream pie in the face trick, whilst in the Horn of Africa a famine had been called, but almost ignored.

Good old Britain has "poured" £52 million into alleviating the problem, but don't we spend nearly as much as that every week in Afghanistan? Come to that, one of the world's richest countries lies just across the narrow expanse of the Red Sea, and what are they doing to help their co-religionists in Somalia? I fear the answer is not a lot. Why not? Is it, I hesitate to ask, because they is black? Maybe they just say it's the Will of Allah. It is what they usually say when something goes wrong, like that time a few years ago when a crowd in Mecca panicked in a tunnel during the Haj and 1200 were crushed to death. I can't help finding that attitude a tad complacent, but then my maco-politics have always been a bit naive.

There is no reason on Earth why a famine should happen anywhere today. The resources are there to solve this problem; indeed, to prevent it happening in the first place. Somalia itself has lots of money, loot the pirates have purloined in the last few years. Is any of that going to be used to help their own people? I doubt it. Is any of the $40 billion of the Murdoch empire going to be aimed at it? See above.

Once again, ordinary middle-class people in the West will dip into their pockets to finance the aid agencies, and nations will donate minute fractions of their GDPs to addressing the problem. And, as always, much of this money will never find its way to ground zero, where millions of men, women and children face one of the most unpleasant fates there is: slow death by starvation and the horrible diseases that engenders. I tell you, we're a shitty planet sometimes, and I'm a part of it. So are you...