Politics: Poor-country economics: Lobbying proceeds from Music to Blogging to Maraching in Mass Demos - Christian Aid backs ..

G8 Watch

The campaign to lobby the G8 (now includes Russia) + China + a handful of other observer countries (like Japan, of course) has now moved from its Live8 Music Concert of concerts, to a Blogathon you can monitor from refWrite's Live8 blogging button in the right-hand column). This will be followed, are already being supplemented by, a mass series of marches to Edinburgh, Scotland, where the main body of demonstrators will be content to remain, we trust. However, there will be several different kinds of voices at hi-pitch in this cacophony. One will be that of Christain Aid that I have respected and trusted for some time, and receive it's missionary newsletter for news that is sometimes of great political important, what with persecution of and sufferings by humble indigenous missionaries in their lands and cultures, who go against the religiuous-political majorities to witness and furthr the witness of Christ. I like that Christian Aid and the timely missionary news I get from them. They also do some relief work of note in poverty-stricken lands. Now they've hooked up with a
presumably Christian movement advocating a utopian economic progrogram, Make Poverty History Now 2005. Of course, it appeals to me. When all this rhetoric gets united and blogged and broadcast around such a notion, it's not easy to dismiss it as apolitical. So I don't. But I don't buy its sloganeering either.

It remains to be seen on the raw political side of things, whether CA and MPHN end up joining the howl rhetoric of the Blair and Bush detractors, while ostensible wantiing to lobby them. It remains to be seen whethert they'll include China's slave labour programs and anti-Christian, anti-Falun Gong militance among their anticipated grandiose indictments. Or, if they're not suck into this kind of performance, whether they'll have the courage to distinguish themselves from the dumpload of that rhetoric anticipated from their co-belligerents. I expect the co-belligerents to wag the Christians like an automaton tail, but I dearly hope I'm wrong.

I doubt that the evangelical fervour in these efforts is really anything new in comparison to the fervour Evangelicals have invested in ineffective campaigns to change economic struturations which, in the end, only the Africans can change. But Evangelicals do need crusades, and the hungry are good hosts on whom to feed these days to launch a crusade. But what about all the hard work of a distincitively economic kind (as against marches, blogs, and music concernts) that has to slowly building up an infrastructure in each country of Africa now in the thralls not only of drawt but of corruption, of hi birth rates unsustainable by resources and lacking infrastructure, unemployment because there aren't enuff businesses to employ the burgeonining masses, the hi incidence of AIDS due to the hi incidence of grasshopper sex and rape one result of which is the diversion of people who mite othersie work at basic gardening and agrculture to the tasks of tending to the sick. It's doubtful much of the money CA and MPHN wants would go to those who could use it well to spread employment, prosperity, and commerce to greater and greater numbers, so that all the missionaries maintaining dire-emergency "feeding stations" now, could at last go home.

I wish this Children's Campagin well, but really hope for more from Bush, Blair, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund which the clowns denounce in totalistic terms you know prima facie can't be true. But, heck, guys and gals, do your thing. Let's see what you can add to the equation of the present status quo. And, remember, we'll be watching you, not just to the end of the present demos, and noticing what direction they take, but also for years to come to see what concretely you do to help create the African infrastructure, while the missionaries you support are supposedly "saving souls." - Owlb