The internet is the future

Why do you think our country is in the state it is, regarding hunger, health, obesity and poverty? What major or underlying issues do you feel are the ones we need to address to help eliminate poverty?

There are too man reasons for the current state of our country, but there is no way to "solve" the problems of hunger or poverty. Poverty is an issue that results from human nature. People are naturally social, but also greedy. Greed causes a social divide, and an impoverished group emerges. Communes often don't have poverty, but communes also do not work on a large scale, as they are based around suppressing part of human nature. When it comes to health and obesity, these problems have not been around forever, but in our country these problems require a great deal more self-motivation than most are willing to accept. Yes, obesity is linked to poverty, but poverty is not the only cause of obesity. Education is not a solution here because the well-educated can be, and often are, just as obese as any poor mother. Rather, there must be a change to our food system. Education will not change how many calories each meal has, but government intervention will. If we stop subsidizing the wrong areas of the food industry, the cheap meals will be the healthier ones. The reason we enjoy sugars so much is because they provide so much energy, but they also require more energy to create. If we return to a more natural agricultural system, we will not overproduce sugary foods while neglecting healthier, less energy-intensive crops.


As for education, we may have the man-power to educate everyone on the ways in which cheap, unhealthy foods affect their long-term health, and can actually keep them in poverty. Instead of trying to force-feed everyone this message, though, it would be easier and better for our country if we simply provided even greater access to this information. Rather than using our energy on education, which is an outdated system in itself that discourages some people who don't learn best in the "standard" way, we could work towards finding a better way to get the information out to everyone where they will find it. The full potential of the internet is still largely undiscovered, but I think that the solutions to many problems such as obesity in our country could be fixed by innovating new methods of information sharing on the internet and ensuring access to everyone. When everyone understands the problems of our nation better, democracy will work better, and change will happen both in people's daily routines and in the government.