Happy New YEAR!

New Year's Eve brought some great conversation to our dinner table last night.

My holiday tradition is to research things after these talks and send out emails clarifying my views. This year's was a ... long one... and I'm going to blog it over the next few days so all that effort is etched in the eternal stone of the active and archived internet:

The big picture. Geopolitical issues for us are somewhat abstract. Not so for people in Iraq, or the far, far greater suffering people in Africa, India and other areas of extreme poverty across the globe.

Although I engage in the politically charged debates about this stuff and enjoy it I'm increasingly and deeply ashamed and concerned by the polarization and roadblocks to progress that they cause. These debates, on a collective national level, interfere GREATLY with all of us coming together on the obvious "low hanging fruit" solutions to pressing global problems such as "better water supplies for developing world" and "Natural disaster relief". Contention is fun but often it is not productive.

It's ironic, tragic, and very fundamentally immoral that we Americans spend more time on the rights of Jose Padilla than the rights of a starving child in the Congo. We can help change this.