Entry 825, on 2008-08-02 at 19:42:26 (Rating 4, Politics)
Recently I have been reading in the paper that the Otago Community Hospice is currently threatened because of lack of funding. It is likely that it will need to lose some of its staff and maybe reduce the number of patients it can help.
Earlier this year I was involved with a charity auction where we raised funds for the same hospice. I only handled the computer requirements (web site, auction database, presentations, etc) and even that took a lot of my time, but my friend who was running it put hundreds of hours of effort in to it. Now it seems that it hasn't really helped that much.
If this sort of organisation isn't worthy of financial help from the government then what is? We live in a democracy with supposedly strong social values. We pay relatively high taxes. Where does it go?
But hospices deal with people who have totally lost their fiscal value. They are going to die soon so their value to society has gone. So why should we invest in them anyway? OK, so many will have paid a lot of tax and made many contributions in other ways during their life but that was then and this is now. Why waste money on someone with no future?
I hope you can tell I'm being bitter and sarcastic with that tirade above. There's no reason to live in a society where worthwhile organisations have to struggle to survive. There's plenty to go around and its just a matter of using the available money fairly.
I'm not just criticising the government we have now - I'm targeting the leadership of every democratic country. And its not just charitable organisations either. If the US had invested in science and technology instead of the war in Iraq then that war would have been unnecessary (Middle Eastern oil supplies would be irrelevant).
What's wrong with the world? We could do so much better but humanity seems to be dedicated to mediocrity and stupidity. Its all so depressing.
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