Author: Isaac

Not that I have any money right now, but I’ve been looking at different types of charities to donate to. To my mind, there are two types of charities. There are ones that are trying to prevent people from starving or some other imminent danger, and then there are ones that try to build something that will benefit people for a long time to come.

It’s important to remember that there are limits to what charity can accomplish. Usually, the more grandiose the idea, the bigger the goal, the more useless the charity is. So, if a charity wants to distribute vaccinations to a village, great! If they want to “end poverty,” it’s best to skip it. I’m also very dubious about the effectiveness of large organizations that have “agendas.”

Not surprisingly, I’ve been attracted to organizations that allow you to pick individuals projects or even people to donate to. The internet has made it possible to link up potential donors with people in need. There are a variety of sites that you can go to in order to make targeted donations. They range from “wish” sites that have Americans in dire straits or are terminally ill that ask for help, to sites that allow you to pick individual projects in third world countries.

For the traditional, give money to alleviate pressing problems right now type of charities, I like Global Giving. They let you pick what kind of cause you would like to help, and then you get to pick the specific project that appeals to you. Take a look around at the site, it’s really amazing.

I’m really amazed with Kiva.org. It is a way for you to get into the whole “microfinance” way of helping people in the third world. This isn’t a charity in the traditional sense. You don’t give money, you lend it. The idea is to stimulate entrepreneurial activity. Here’s how it works. A person approaches a lending institution in the country they live in with a business idea. The institution goes over the numbers and determines the viability of the business. If everything looks good, they post on Kiva and tell you about the idea and the amount they are looking for. You can donate anything from $25 all the way up to the total amount of the loan. The loans tend to be anywhere between $250 and $1000. When enough money has been collected, the loan is issued and repayment is expected within 6 months or a year depending on the loan.

Ok, yes, there is a possibility that the person defaults on the loan. Kiva claims that 98% of the loans are paid back. Here’s where it gets really interesting. Once your money is paid back, you have the option of taking it back, or in funding another loan. In other words, the money you put in can be used over and over again, helping different people over time.

Even $500 can go a very long ways in places like Madagascar or Tanzania. It can change lives. Very often, there are business opportunities to be had, but there is very little credit to go around. The idea that the $25 that you put in can be used over and over is very exciting. Sustainable charity has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it?

There have been some interesting developments in the news involving marriage recently. Iowa’s supreme court has declared that the banning of same sex marriages is unconstitutional. They even went one step past that and said a “separate but equal” civil union plan would not be lawful either. I get the impression that it is more difficult to amend the Iowan constitution than the Californian one. Expect an attempt, I can’t imagine the rank and file in Iowa being OK with this decision.

There has been general outrage over a newish law in Afghanistan that apparently legalizes the rape of a wife by her husband. There are enormous swaths of the world that assumes that wives have no say when it comes to sex with her husband, but I can’t think of any other place that actually passed a law legalizing it. I don’t even think that Saudi has a law like that. Of course that is only because it is simply assumed that sex is the wife’s duty to her husband… So why did Afghanistan pass a law like that? Here’s the (I assume) British foreign officer Marc Brown to explain.

“The rights of women was one of the reasons the UK and many in the West threw ourselves into the struggle in Afghanistan.”

When you apply external pressure to a culture in order to bring about change that is more in line with the pressuring culture, you will have blowback. Let’s be honest, if a husband rapes his wife in Afghanistan, not a damn thing will be done about it, regardless of what is written in the books in Kabul. No one will ever hear about it. The culture there is what it is, and you just do not talk about sex there. That doesn’t mean we just throw up our hands and accept things as they are though. Cultural change is possible, but not at the point of a gun.

Which brings me back to Iowa. Both the ruling in Iowa and the law in Afghanistan are examples of the government overstepping it’s bounds. There isn’t any reason why the government should be weighing in on what an appropriate marriage is. In the same vein, there isn’t any reason for the government to ever pass a law making it OK to have nonconsensual sex with someone. One is a populist reaction, and the other will most likely cause one.

The bottom line is that cultural change cannot come from the top down. We can’t come into Afghanistan with the Army, shake up their ideas of sex roles, and expect them to just change. In the same way, you can’t expect the supreme court to issue a ruling and make the citizens of that state OK with gay marriage. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that the probable drop in marital rape in this country had little to do with the laws on the books and everything to do with men thinking that they really should not rape their wives. The change has to come from the bottom up. In an ideal world, men wouldn’t rape their wives and people wouldn’t care who married whom. Do we really think those ideals will be reached by passing laws?

This week has made some chinks in the armor in the “war on drugs.” First, our secretary of state admitted that the US shares some of the blame for the violence that is occurring along the border with Mexico. It wasn’t a perfect confession of course; She didn’t broach the idea that our laws are what cause the violence, but it’s a start. Acknowledging that our government is partially responsible is a good first step, but I worry that this will lead to a “war on arms smuggling,” or perhaps a “war on money smuggling” instead of the obvious cure to stop the wars.

The other interesting development came from New York state. They are going to repeal a lot of the mandatory sentencing guidelines for first and second time drug offenders and give judges the option of sending people to rehab for other drug related crimes. In addition, they are going to allow people currently incarcerated for those offenses to redo their sentences. This is great move, it’s certainly the humane thing to do. In addition to the possibility of not ruining people’s lives by sending them to jail, the state estimates that it can save upwards of 250 million a year by implementing these policies.

I’m getting the distinct feeling that people are beginning to understand how cruel, costly, and ineffective this “war” really is. People that know me well know that I do not think that recreational drug usage is a good idea, I don’t even drink very often. I do believe that people that use drugs have enough problems without the government breathing down their necks and threatening them with jail time. Maybe you’ve heard that old joke, “What’s the worst thing that could happen to a kid that tries pot? He could go to jail..” I also am convinced that it is the illegality of the drugs that leads directly to the violence and the other crimes committed in order to obtain them. After all, how many times do we hear about people robbing and stealing in order to support their alcohol habit? Anyway, I’m glad to hear that there’s some progress being made, let’s hope the momentum continues to build and we can finally end this war.