I generally avoid browsing at YouTube because it inevitably annoys me. I’ll click through to watch individual videos that other bloggers have linked, but I normally don’t surf the site. Here’s one reason why:
We can be the generation that ends poverty.
In September 2000, at the United Nations Millennium Summit, world leaders agreed to the Millennium Development Goals, a set of time-bound and measurable goals for combating poverty, hunger, disease, illiteracy, environmental degradation and discrimination against women.
The deadline to achieve the MDGs is September 2015 — we must act now if we want to achieve these goals by their deadline.
Upload your video now to join the chorus with Will.i.am, John Legend, Scarlett Johansson and others around the world.
Your simple video message will join thousands of others in the call to end poverty in our lifetime.
These morons – yes, morons, bordering on oxygen thieves – have somehow convinced themselves that creating a video actually accomplishes something worthwhile. And the pathetic, useless UN, which can’t even stop their employees from gang raping the people they’ve been sent to protect and has mishandled billions of dollars, isn’t going to end poverty with or without these videos.
We don’t need a “call to end poverty.” We need people to pony up. Not governments, which inevitably blow the money they confiscate on expanding themselves and only allow a little to trickle down to those who need it. But people, giving to organizations that have to be accountable for what they do in order to remain in existence.
You want to fight poverty? There are huge numbers of options. My church supports an orphanage in Mexico and a ministry in Malaysia, for example. My family gives to those and to Sovereign Grace Ministries. We sponsor children through Compassion. Find out what churches in your area are doing to help the poor and join them in their efforts. Go through your stuff, have a garage sale or put it on eBay, and give the proceeds away. Instead of wasting your time creating useless videos, take a second job and give the money to charity.
If you want to help the poor on the political level, ask Congress to continue to expand the African Growth and Opportunity Act, first signed by Bill Clinton and then repeatedly expanded by George W. Bush, which has done far more to end African poverty than the UN ever dreamed of doing. Advocate, and more importantly, donate, for people who are enslaved, yes, in actual slavery with chains and everything, right now.
If you want to stick to secular giving, try Doctors Without Borders or Habitat for Humanity. Help this guy teach people to build windmills. Make a micro-loan; it’s one of the most satisfying things you can do because it helps the person you lend to help himself. And when you’re repaid, you can do it again. And again. And again – each time lifting someone a little further out of poverty and putting them in a position to help their own community.
There are literally thousands, probably tens of thousands, of actual, practical, poverty-alleviating things you could do. Creating a video which will only serve to feed your narcissism is not one of them.
The part that aggravates me is not that people waste time making videos. I waste hours on this crap blog every week; while it’s true that my family are big believers in giving our money and time away, I could certainly be doing more. I should be doing more and the fact that I’m not shames me. You want to make a video? Go to it. Knock yourself out. But stop pretending – maybe even to yourselves – that what you’re doing will mean something. It won’t. It’s a sham; something easily done to convince yourself you’re helping so you don’t have to give of yourself in any serious, sacrificial way.
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