Bill Clementson's Blog

Do They Know It's Christmas?

Friday, December 24, 2004

I remember back in the mid-1980's when the Band Aid record "Do They Know It's Christmas" first came out. Then, there were pictures of starving kids in Africa. Now, the record's come out again, 20 years later, and there are still starving kids in Africa. Twenty years - that's a pretty long time. That was way back when Lisp was first starting to "make it big". That was way before the "AI Winter", way before C++ caught on, and way, way before Java caught on. You would think that, in 20 years, the world would have learned how to solve the problem of starving kids in Africa. However, seeing how as technology hasn't really "advanced" in these 20 years (moving from Lisp to C++ to Java), I suppose that it shouldn't really be a surprise that social consciousness hasn't advanced either. I guess we need to get used to the fact that there's never going to be some international "grand plan" that will solve these types of problems; however, there are all sorts of ways to help out on an individual basis.

As Gandhi said, "Be the change you wish to see in the world".