TIME Persons of the Year

On my way home from a Christmas vacation in Oklahoma I read the Dec. 26/Jan. 2 issue of TIME magazine, the one with Bono and Bill and Melinda Gates on the cover. It was informative. I had no idea how much money the Gateses have given away to international public health causes. The article pointed out how no-nonsense Bill Gates is. The journalist said Gates didn’t look at her for the first fifteen minutes of the interview, letting his wife answer the softie questions that he simply can’t bear. The article said if you can’t talk with Bill on a high level about international aid or science, you will be wasting his time, and he’ll let you know. Something to keep in mind if you ever bump into him.

What I appreciate are the straightforward questions Bill Gates asks when he’s researching a crisis or deciding whether or not to support a cause. He asks questions like “Who owns the land?” and “How much do the health-care workers earn?” He’s interested in the practical nitty-gritty. It’s also been widely reported that the Gates Foundation has abruptly cut off its aid to organizations that do not meet the foundation's criteria for putting resources to good use. I appreciate these things about the Gateses because they demonstrate a commitment to get things done. I need to admit something: I’m prone to daydream and imagine without getting anything done. Say what you want about his business practices; Bill Gates is a guy who really does stuff. Bono claims Gates has figured out how to fix Malaria in ten years, for example. Gates's results-based approach reminds me that at some point, you have to roll up your sleeves and convert ideas into action.

I was also pleased to read that Bono isn’t just lending his charm and celebrity to his poverty eradication campaign. He has a detailed working knowledge of the issues, and one has only to talk with him for a few minutes, according to Bill Gates, to discover he knows what he’s talking about.

Darfur

Ron Sider's article in today's issue of ESA's PRISM ePistle about Darfur convicted me. He wrote, "Senator Paul Simon said shortly before his death 'that if only 100 people in each Congressional district had demanded a stop to the Rwandan genocide, that effort would have generated a determination to stop it. But Americans didn't write such letters to their members of Congress then, and they're not writing them now.”

Sider and Simon are right. The only way our government is going to take genocide in Darfur seriously is if we all start writing some emails. Here's what I wrote to my senators, my representative, and the president:

Dear _________:

We in the U.S. have the resources to stop the genocide in Darfur. But do we have the will? I hope so. I commend to you Nicholas Kristof's piece, which appeared in the November 29th issue of the TIMES entitled “What's to Be Done About Darfur? Plenty” for ideas about how to stop the first genocide of the twenty-first century. Americans elected you into office, and now we are pleading with you to do something--something historic that changes life on the ground in Africa--about this issue.

Sincerely,


For information on how to reach your legislators, click here for Senators, here for your Congressperson, and here for the president.

Christian social activists are not asking for our money on this one. They're asking for our voices. Let's make some noise!

Sobering

Listening to Ryan Sharp, this thought came:

I shutter to think just how much of my life is consumed with the conflict between the American Dream and the Kingdom of God.

Network Theory from Dr. King

"Through our scientific and technological genius, we have made of this world a neighborhood and yet we have not had the ethical commitment to make of it a brotherhood. But somehow, and in some way, we have got to do this. We must all learn to live together as brothers or we will all perish together as fools. We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. And whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. For some strange reason I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. And you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the way God’s universe is made; this is the way it is structured."

--Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., March 31, 1968, four days before his death

Read the entire sermon here.