Sunday - November 04, 2007
Starbucks and the Hippie Cup
The girl at work the other day gave me her empty Starbucks cup and said read it, knowing full well how I'd react.
The Way I See It # 288Mr. Losang may be a nice person. He probably means well. But think of the political philosophy which underlines his statement.My Cousin in Tibet is an illiterate subsistence farmer. By accident of birth, I was raised in the West and have a Ph.D. The task of our generation is to cut through the illusion that we inhabit separate worlds. Only then will we find the heart to rise to the daunting but urgent challenges of global disparity.
-Losang Rabgey, Ph.D.
National Geographic Emerging Explorer and co-founder of Machik, a nonprofit helping communities on the Tibetan plateau.
He suffers from liberal guilt. Inherit in his words is the idea that his wealth and well-being are somehow tainted. His wealth and well-being somehow cause others to live in poverty. Basically, somehow the West is at fault and one is obligated to right that wrong.
Unfortunately, people like Mr. Losang will never admit to such an idea that the cultural, political, and economic values of the West are the very things that allow him to prosper and it is the lack of such values that cause vast swaths of the world to wallow in poverty.
We do inhabit separate worlds. The West practices religious tolerance and free enterprise, and exercises those values in a democratic system while other parts of the world eschew market forces and freedom.
"Global disparity" is not the product of anything America does, it is the result of what the rest of the world doesn't do.
Mr. Losang's guilt is misplaced, but typical of the liberalism born in the sixties. Unlike the true progressives of the early twentieth century, Mr. Losang doesn't feel a duty to help others because of his station in life, he feels a deep shame that it is his nation that causes the pain of others.
If he was really concerned about his cousins in Tibet, he would send them the works of Paine, Jefferson, Smith, and Locke and cases of M-16s to overthrow their communist masters.
Author: The Machiavellian
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