There are times when you have to trust that the government knows what it’s doing. When those times will come, I have no idea.
Various agencies, including the UN, have been crying for help in Niger and other places (including our own cities and schools) for long enough to have been heard by countries with the wherewithall to put the thumb to some portion of the cracking dike. The president is supportive of Intelligent Design (now that’s news), yet people who should know better can’t intelligently design some means of providing food to the hungry (and gifts of wonder to systems in bad need of repair). Let’s give tax dollors to profitable energy companies (how many times do I have to pay the power company?) so that they can profit more in my name. Sure, it’s a Christian country. When it’s easy.
Shame on us.
Not shame on all of us; shame on those of us who can help and don’t.
Several things going on here cloud the issue and prevent a reasonable resolution. The power is given to government by it’s people, yet the government is powerful beyond and over the citizenry.
To give a voice to the government that speaks for its populace, the majority rules the PA system. While thems that got it donate the huge majority of dollars for aid, its done in the name of tax deductions–fine, we’ll take it any way we can. You don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. The poor cannot step up into the world outside of welfare and crime because the work mentality requires more of them than they have the qualifications to meet–often because the qualifications are far and away above what is truly needed to successfully perform a job.
And in the middle, the middle class, who get nothing nor give. Because they can’t. And more and more, are unwilling to because they are desperately trying to hold onto their homes and are forced to forget about enjoying a future of retirement–it either comes too early when they’re forced out at 55, or not at all as they find themselves as Walmart greeters at 75. Meanwhile, thousands of jobs are going overseas–we don’t have as big a worry of immigrants coming in and taking American jobs (yes, we’re all from immigrant families, but by now, generations have paid their dues and taxes), as we have of the jobs going directly overseas. My husband’s former job as a design engineer is now in India.
This can’t help but breed resentment as we struggle to keep bread on the table. Okay, so maybe it’s whole wheat, but we can adjust down when we need to. And lately, that need is always right around the next bend. That’s why so many are not as concerned as Christians, Jews, Buddhists, or anyone, regardless of religious beliefs but simply as human beings, as they would really like to be.
Being a Christian has yet been easy. In the name of the Almighty we shed blood to be a free nation. And today the country is ruled by those that fight to call this country anything but Christian because the Christian life is just too hard.. or hip for that matter. So the problem of Niger, the collapsing German economy, and North Korea can hardly be blamed on a Christian country. The United States of America is no Christian country. More like a country with Christians.
It’s frustatingly amusing that the U.N. cries to the U.S. for help, but refuse to acknowledge a two-way street. World hunger is a Human problem, and therefore it is a World problem, and by default a U.N. problem. Perhaps the U.N. would be more interested in Niger if it got them more leverage as a world power to counteract the “evil beast” that is America.
As Christians we respond as a World population wherever we can because that is how it is meant to be. Many of those Christians are Americans, so in that respect the U.S. has indeed responded.. as have many other nations in the same.