Look down at your wrist. Are you wearing a white wristband? Do the words ‘Make Poverty History’ shine back at you from beneath the arm of your Argyle sweater? If so, find a mirror – I want you to take a good hard look at yourself.
You’re part of a new sub-section of society, and it’s one that I can’t stand. Sure, your intentions are generally good, but they come from such a warped sense of reality that the chances of your actions affecting any real change are lower than Kevin Rudd’s future career prospects.
The current generation of Gen-X, Y and countless other letters of the alphabet are lost in a sea of middle class guilt, powerless to actually achieve anything laudable other than march down a clean, orderly city street, latte in hand, screaming something incomprehensible about war in a foreign land they were never aware of until it was featured on Getaway.
These are the people who attend giant free ‘awareness’ concerts, alongside thousands of fans paying nothing to dance to the latest indie-pop experimental audio-atrocities, all the while yelling at the government to end poverty. And for what? Where is the major shift in global power and domination that we were supposed to see by now?
The days of civil disobedience should have gone to their grave with the failure of the Vietnam war, together with a realisation that any amount of simple ‘awareness’ is not going to make any real difference to those that need it. I’m sure that a starving family in Pakistan really appreciated the $1 donation from the sale of the white wristband . They equally would have appreciated the $3.80 you spend on your afternoon Grande Latte with a dash of hazelnut, served in your fashionably-coloured, recycled, reusable coffee cup.
Give up now, you ABC-loving, Trotsky-inspired, latte-sipping, turtle-neck-wearing, perpetual-university-student, Green-voting lefties. Besides, we all know that history always repeats itself. We can work towards a world without poverty, but in the end, we’ll end up back where we started and it’ll be back to the stone age for us. And all because you wanted to wear a white wristband.
Ken Krank
(Address withheld)
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