$3ADDP: The Yale Project

Well I've apparently been living under a rock. When googling $3 a Day Diet Project to see where my google page rank is the Yale $3 a Day Diet Project came up first. It seems that $3 is what the food stamp allowance is for the population of people who are being fed by the United States Government. In the article I read from the Yale Daily News, one of the students part of the project who considered himself a very serious activist had to give up cage free eggs for regular eggs because he just couldn't afford to care about animal rights in light of how expensive they are and how little he had to spend a day. What I'm going to say next is going to make me VERY unpopular.

I think that it's easy for people who have the money to worry about the activist side of things. That's why most politicians are already fairly well off before they get into the game. The average person living in a lower middle class to lower class situation can't afford to care about things like whether or not the food they're eating is organic or whether or not it's right or wrong to cage animals that are set for slaughter anyway. They're worried about what they're going to eat and what their families are going to eat.

It's the responsibility of those us that do have the money to care about these things in the larger picture because we can AFFORD to. That being said, here comes the unpopular part; shouldn't we care more about activism for human needs before animal needs? See, I get that animals are adorable and cuddly. I have my cat, George Kitteh, sitting on my TV right now trying at the moving pictures on screen as though he can stop the lights from moving. I love him dearly. Would I save him above the average human? No.

That makes me sound really unloving or disloyal. I know. But at the end of the day, aside from the circle of happiness intertwining George's life, my life and my husband's life, there is little that George can contribute to society. The average human, however, if given the opportunity could do great things for mankind.

I'm not trying to tell you, my dear reader, what you should and should not care about. I'm simply musing on what we humans have compassion for and how our priorities work. It's rather remarkable how far apart everyone believes. It's what makes the social activism landscape of the US both effective and ineffective.

Have you ever thought that as a nation, without government involvement because we don't want fiscal waste and everyone knows private sector can do it more efficiently than public sector, if we made a list of all the causes that had foundations or organizations related to them and put it to a vote to see which one was MOST important to the nation and everyone just focused on that for a while, the problems we could resolve? Obesity? A problem of the past. Cancer? Totally cured. HIV/AIDS? That's gone too. Illiteracy? Not on our watch. One by one, the collective resolve of an educated and relatively wealthy nation, would knock down each problem.