just how powerful are words?

the question of meaningfulness was raised last year, but then it returned: Blog Action Day came back this year, with a plea against Poverty.

some [myself included] might tend to think of this in terms of rights and duties and point that the debate is not a debate at all, given the non-contested existence of the 2nd generation of human rights, the so-referred-to Socio-Economic & Cultural Rights; after all, the World already did commit in this direction when creating the ICESCR, haven't we?... [and that was a while ago!]

others [much more pragmatic] think of devising solutions to address the root cause and thus use the Internet to more obvious purposes: Ripple is a case in point, whilst the Washington Post gives a handful of other examples.

and yet, there are also those who wonder what's the efficiency of having bloggers address Poverty today, when words might amount to nothing by tomorrow: here's the full article.

How much will bad#08 manage to accomplish still remains to be seen, but we can all see why addressing a topic might be more helpful than keeping silent; and the current financial crisis should prove as an incentive in this respect. As for the "why" of it, that's self-referential:

poverty, n.

1. The state of being poor; lack of the means of providing material needs or comforts.

[definition taken from here]


http://blogactionday.org/js/72216bd17ad528d3530995144bbaf25846e4d835