Our loses vs Somalia's loses

I've been hearing a lot of people freaking out about the 31 US Soldiers that were killed the other day. Every once in a while someone will briefly mention the eight or nine Afghan Commandos that were with the 31 US soldiers and also killed, but most people glaze over that. We're always so concerned about our troops; and don't get me wrong, we should be! War is an evil thing, "it's only friend is the undertaker," as a great musician once said. It is a tragedy to lose a life like that, but these people have signed up to risk their lives. I would say it's almost like attempting suicide! Granted, the likelihood of dying is pretty low, but there is that chance. These are wasted lives, and chosen to run the risk of wasting their lives. They leave behind family: parents, siblings, spouse, and often very young children. I think that anyone who has a family and joins the military is really dumb for doing so. Those children will never get to know their parent, and the spouse has lost the love of his/her life, and has to start over, hoping to find someone new.
Ok, that's turned into my rant against military. Back to topic.

We freak out about the lose of lives of people who chose to risk their lives, we freak out when our economy takes a dive. Yet who is causing the economy to dive? the rich. They don't really feel the loss that much, or they may, but they can still afford to go out and buy a Mercedes the next day, but those of us who are common people, who can't afford to get into the stock market, and end up losing their jobs, those are the ones that are hurting. But still, most of us can still have a good roof over our heads, a running car in the garage, cable TV, electricity, and food on the table. And if we're having difficulty with food on the table, we have wonderful programs like Food Stamps. There are currently almost 40million people on Foodstamps, I'm actually one of them. But, we have food.
In Somalia, in the last three months, 30,000 children have died due to not having food. I heard about a six-month old baby that weighed in at 6lbs! I was three pounds more than that when I was born. Millions of people in Africa are without food, or a place to live. They're putting ten people in a wood-framed, trash-covered hut. Yes, people's houses are made out of trash.
Also, there are 2.5 BILLION people in the world who don't even have access to clean water. Water! 2.5 billion people, human beings, without water. Could they have water? yeah. We have the technology and resources to provide clean water access and food to every person in the world. It just takes a little jump start, and then they can start growing their own food. The water is in the ground, in most places, but they don't have the wells to draw the water from, and if they do, the wells are right next to the toilet facilities.

These are images from Rwanda. The first is the toilet for the community, the second is where the community gets its water. Could you imagine living like that? But they do.
We freak out so much over our loses, yet we still have way more than 2.5 Billion people. The UK goes crazy and riots, our stock market goes down, people freak out over becoming too socialist. Let me tell you what the alternative to socialism is, these photos above. People living like that, while others live in mansions with multiple cars, and more rooms than can be filled. Can you condemn someone to live like that? Or are you so concerned with yourself that you don't care what other people have to go through, as long as you have your big screen TV. We've been more focused on our own big TV, while 2.5 billion people don't even have water.
Course, here I sit, in front of a 6-core 3.2GHz, 4GB RAM, 4GB hard drives, two wide-screen monitors (which actually I got for free because someone was throwing them away....wtf?), and I have a laptop, and I'm hoping to soon get an Archos G9 101 tablet (better than the iPad). And I in the last year and a half, I've spent $3,000 on amazon with credit. So, I'm kind of a hypocrite. But, I'm doing something to help.
And you can help too. Find a charity that helps provide water, farming training, etc, to Africa. It doesn't take much. Donate $5 if that's all you can do. But if you can donate $50, or $100 do so. You'll be saving countless lives.
Here are a few of my favorite charities:
Seeds of Hope International Partnerships - www.sohip.org (my mother runs the US office for this group)
LifeWater - www.lifewater.org
Project Africa Community Empowerment - www.projectacenow.org (who also gets credit for the photos above, and which I am the webmaster)

There are also several others out there. BloodWater and Charity:Water are also good charities to give to.

Don't wait for someone else to do something, do something yourself.
That's what I would do.