America's Shame

In consideration of recent developments, I am going to entirely ignore the final third of my blog’s title and focus exclusively on social justice, and the lack thereof. Outrage is the only term that can accurately describe my emotional state upon seeing this excerpt from a UN General Assembly Proceedings:

By a vote of 180 in favour to 1 against (United States) and no abstentions, the Committee also approved a resolution on the right to food, by which the Assembly would “consider it intolerable” that more than 6 million children still died every year from hunger-related illness before their fifth birthday, and that the number of undernourished people had grown to about 923 million worldwide, at the same time that the planet could produce enough food to feed 12 billion people, or twice the world’s present population.

Now as if this travesty had not sufficiently turned my stomach, the US continued down the road of moral penury with a startling apathy:

After the vote, the representative of the United States said he was unable to support the text because he believed the attainment of the right to adequate food was a goal that should be realized progressively. In his view, the draft contained inaccurate textual descriptions of underlying rights.

Perhaps we should congratulate our representative for their obviously super-human skills of perception, and for being the only one lucid enough to recognize the blatant “inaccuracy” of recognizing the injustice of childhood malnutrition.

As a US citizen, I felt a patriotic duty to make my objection to this ignoble deed heard, and to not allow my government to proceed with impunity while disregarding human rights. To this end, I hope all of you readers will share this position, and act upon your objection in any of a variety of methods.

Nathan