What the world is coming to....

I'm currently reading "The End of Poverty" by the renowned economist Jeffrey Sachs. It's a great book, explaining how, through very reasonable means, we can end extreme poverty in the world in our lifetime. (Extreme poverty being the kind of poverty where people are unable to survive on their means - hunger, lack of drinking water, death by diseases such as AIDS and malaria, lack of access to medical facilities, electricity, roads, good farming, etc.)

Now, I'm not here to preach on a pedestal like I'm some saint, I know most certainly that I am not, and I am just as much of a consumer American as a lot of other people. That said, however, I am appalled at this new craze with the book "The Secret" which Oprah so wrongly put on her reading list. I credit Oprah with getting a massive amount of Americans to read Steinbeck, and Garcia Marquez. So I am disappointed to find this book on the list, which is being read by every other person on my morning train.

The crux, it seems, is the notion of the "law of attraction." Meaning, think about the thing you want really hard, and it will then be attracted to you. In some ways this applies to a love interest, or other non-tangible items, but mostly it appears the examples are material goods - a BMW, a toy, etc. Great, just what we need, more people focusing more attention on themselves and thinking more about what they don't have and want and feel they need, instead of thinking about what they already have - like clean drinking water, electricity, and wonderful mass transit. The juxtaposition is amazing. The people I see reading this book do not appear to be lacking in the material goods department. They are business men and women on their way to at a minimum decent paying jobs downtown. I don't understand, in a world where there are so many needless deaths because of the failures of rich countries like ours, how people worry more about that new blackberry than worry about the death of another human being from something so curable, like hunger. If people read "The End of Poverty" at the same rate they are consuming this other crap, maybe we really could end extreme poverty by 2025. I could only hope.