Ok, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking in the past few months, and lots of accelerated thinking in the past few days. Here’s the mind dump.

You can’t erradicate slavery in the world until people aren’t hungry. If a country is hungry there are going to be slaves.

You can’t get rid of hunger until women are actually worth something in rural villages, until a baby girl is worth just as much as a baby boy.

You can’t realize a world where women are worth what men are worth until you fix the old and deeply etched culture of each rural village that lives in every old man and old woman, every local healer and little child. Yes, cultures need to be corrected–but not that alone, they need to correct themselves. The fire has to come from within.

You can’t fix hunger by sending food, not even by planefuls and boatfuls. That makes it worse. After a bad week have four beers and a whisky, feel horrible and sad and so have another drink. You’ll just have a worse hangover the next day because of the extra drink. Well, ok, that analogy doesn’t make a ton of sense. But really the future cannot look like countries sending food to other countries, and every step that way is a step away from what the future can look like.

And like Norman Borlaug would say, you can’t build a peaceful world on empty stomachs.

(from a month or two ago, I got lazy and didn’t final-draft-edit it)