It seems that I am sick and tired about hearing a lot of what I consider self-pitying arguments. Want to know what the latest one is? I will tell you…

“Well, the people in that country are poor and can’t do it for themselves so we have to help them.”

Wow… Let’s take a moment and think about American History… If anyone does not know it we were not always the superpower we are today. In fact for the first few hundred years we were just some lowly upstart colonists and not paid much attention to and certainly not helped in any way. We were just another backwater country and one that was considered very uncivilized. We were the poor and loathed of the world until about the late 19th century. Yes, it took us 350 years to really become anything that the world would consider a power at all. Even then, it was not until World War I that we made a difference on the world stage. But since then, well I do not need to tell you all about it.

So, we American started out with nothing. We came here and for a very long time we very nearly starved to death, even though the land was bountiful. But we worked the land, we made something of it and survived. We built wealth from the sweat of our brow, we did not ask for hand outs, and even if we did, who would have given it to us. Finally, in an act of economic survival we rebelled against the motherland and stated for ourselves the liberty and freedom we desired.

A new country of upstarts now formed we welcomed anyone here who would be productive and loyal to their adoptive country. The immigrants entered, signed the books and promised and pledged allegiance to their new home, ties to the homeland broken. They remembered their homeland for a generation or two and that gave our great country a flavor all its own. We were building a population base and needed all the workers we could get. That is not the case today however, we do not need more people, in fact we may have too many as it is. But the point is that we stood on our own two feet and with pride in our labors made our country what it is today.

History lesson over.

So, now we are faced with some very interesting choices. We see around the globe countries that “need help”. Maybe their populations are starving, maybe the current political atmosphere is oppressing the people. Maybe we are looking at them and want to help them. Maybe that is about the worst idea you can possibly come up with.

I hate to sound like a heartless son of a bitch, but let’s take a lesson from our own past. No one helped us, we are under no obligation to help them. Look how we turned out. Now, I know that the above sediment can incite some debate, but you know what I mean, we are a world power and have a high standard of living, and we did it on our own.

Now I recognize that some of you may say that we have a moral imperative to help some of these countries, maybe with direct aid (justifiable in times of natural disasters) or by letting them walk all over our economy (no way justifiable), but what is the cost to us, and them? We are alleviating the need for these countries to grow on their own. We are coddling them and giving them the fish, but not the pole or fishing lessons. These countries are going nowhere and with our help will never get anywhere.

History tells us that not all countries survive, that is why we have to change the maps so often. History tells us that countries with proactive populations do tend to survive. History tells us that foreign aid almost always kills the country that receives it.

So, what do we have? Well we have a harsh world that can not be fixed by liberal policy and generosity. We have a world ruled by Darwinian Dynamics and we have to watch it happen knowing that it is the way the nature creates strong countries and eliminates weak ones. We can not help everyone. With seven billion people on this planet, it is not possible given the infrastructure we have. The seven billion will have to help themselves even though we can now see their suffering in an age of instant communications. 

Yes the beauty of our technology has brought us the brutality of nature and a scope to view the raw and vital cycles that shape the world we live in. It is a powerful scope indeed, one that most people cannot view without engaging in personally, but we must.

The first forty thousand years of human evolution were done without the lens of communications and progress was made. In fact many would argue that progress was made at an astonishingly rapid rate. So we must treat the dispassionate lens with the dispassion it deserves and not become involved in its both micro and macro view.

We are witnessing history like never before and like most natural cycles and events it is brutal and devastating. We cannot change it, we can only ride it out for ourselves. The trends and cycles are too large and forceful to stop by throwing a few dollars to a starving child in Central America or even allowing our economy and society to be compromised on the hope that change is possible. These actions would be isolated band-aids at best, at worst, they will kill people, both in the starving country and this country.

(Kill people in a foreign country you ask? Yep… tell you what… drop a load of food in the middle of a group of starving people, then tell me how many died in the rush to get the food. Want to place a wager that one of the dead is the starving child you wanted to help in the first place? Then in three weeks tell me how many more died waiting for another load of food that never came. The politics of hunger are the worst politics to play with. Better to turn a blind eye and understand it and know that nature is at work in its’ most brutal form.

Kill people in this country you ask? Yep… let’s assume that we allow everyone in this country and allow them to do whatever they want. Well, as they send the money out of this country it will create an inflationary economy. Goods and services will cost more and wages may or (more likely) may not keep up. A woman in a desperate straight cannot pay for her baby daughters formula. The child starves in this country. Now that is sad, but what does it matter, it is in this country and we are only looking at the poor and dying in other countries. Guess we forgot to take care of number one.)

So, what do we have… well we have a brutal world that has been this way from day one and we are just now seeing it in all its’ gory beauty. We are now smart enough to know that we are just elements in a much larger cycle that is subtle and brutal. Our decisions and action on a daily basis effect every element of the whole. When we buy a tray of shrimp from China, you are supporting the policies of that country. You buy some shoes made by child labor in El Salvador, you are starving a child in this country, maybe killing the kid in El Salvador as well (hey, the shoes are selling, the boss will work the kids more to make more profit. Kids die, but so what, there are more to take their place.) Everything is tied together, and nothing a single individual can do will fix it. In fact, the force for change must be found at the source and by the better part of the population. And for change to be made, the poor population may have to spill the blood of their own and their oppressors.

Those poor people, they have the potential in their own hands to be the next world power, the next shapers of the world. They just have to realize it and do it, and no amount of help in terms of money or aid will accomplish that.