Show me the Blood

If you’re not familiar with the TED Conferences and their website, you should be.  Many of humanity’s greatest endeavors are revealed there.  A few weeks ago, Bill Gates gave a talk on malaria.  Malaria needlessly kills 1 million people every year and at any given time 200 million more are suffering from its debilitating effects.  Gates lamented the fact that more money is spent on developing drugs for baldness than for malaria.  He stated that, “there is no reason that only poor people should have the experience” of being exposed to malaria transmitting mosquitoes and to reinforce this, Gates released a number of mosquitoes from a jar into the audience.  The point hit home - we have to be exposed to the reality of malaria (or anything else) before we act.

Today, we have the ability to access truth and reality as never before.   I don’t want a sanitized version of the events of our day, especially when the policies of elected governments are in question.  Show me the blood and guts arising out of military mistakes in Afghanistan; let me see the real suffering of mothers and babies dying of AIDS; lay out the consequences of my indifference when it comes to extreme poverty or injustice.  Why should we let news networks, editors, or government bureacracies, filter the news we receive?  The life and death issues of our time demand that our senses be exposed to their reality - no matter how painful.  Only then will we be compelled to act.