There's no electricity in that house. You're just buying food, you're trying to stay alive. As reported by Sam Howe Verhovek in the New York Times, Gates, who was the conference's closing speaker, doused that hope by denying that the poor would become part of the wired world any time soon. U.S. foreign aid to the poor represents a pathetic fraction of our budget, while we devote ever larger sums to building a sophisticated military without a sophisticated enemy in sight. Yet those misplaced priorities went totally unchallenged by the presidential candidates of both major parties.
Poverty is the major security problem both within and without our country.
These days the have-nots have many windows to the haves, and resentment is inevitable. It is the breeding ground of disorder and terror, and it is absurd to think that a stable new world order can be built on such an uneven foundation. One of the ironies of the wired world is that those terrorists in their remote mountain camps are wired into the Internet, which has facilitated the coordination of their evil plans. The terrorists have all the laptops and cellular phones they want, but they depend for their effectiveness on recruiting from the ranks of the alienated poor who don't have medicines, food or a safe source of water.