Dream up the kind of world you want to live in. Dream out loud. — Bono / Okay. — EarthNationLive

January 16th, 2010

Imagine

there’s something like Facebook

in the world, a digital network which connects you

to your friends, people you know, people who can be relied upon.

Except it’s ten times as big — 3 billion members instead of 300 million —

because it’s connected to a series of huge monthly concerts that

are broadcast and webcast around the world, which raise

awareness of it constantly, which raise money

constantly, which make it the hippest and

most happenin’ social network

in the world.  Call it, say,

EarthNationLive. Or

pick another

name.

Imagine

with the fantastic amount

of money that flows through it (because

sweet Jesus a lot of money moves around music

on this planet), it puts a few things in place around the world

so they’re there if something dramatic happens — an earthquake or a stolen

election or an ethnic conflict.  A communications network, say, that can

function if the power goes out, whether in Durban or Boulder or

Taipei or Port-au-Prince.  Nothing fancy, maybe just walkie

talkies.  But they’re there.  They’re in the hands of

members of this network, who keep a list of

their EarthNationLive contacts on

their iPhone or in their wallet

or both.  They’re stored

where buildings can’t

fall on them.

Imagine that

when something dramatic happens,

they log in if they can, or bark into a walkie talkie if there’s

no such thing as an internet at that moment,

and give their positions and

identities.

Imagine there’s

some mayhem and death and sewage

in the drinking water.  Imagine there are naval vessels

in the harbor that want to get aid in, but have to know where to put it,

and how to get it there through broken streets and bands of people with bad

intentions, and need thirty or three hundred reliable people, people who know

and trust one another, and are known and trusted in the community,

to be standing there at the proper GPS coordinates to protect

and distribute some medicine or water or sutures

when a helicopter comes to

drop a load.

Imagine how

useful those folks with the

cheap little walkie talkies would be then.

Like Wednesday in Haiti.

Like Thursday.

Like now.

They’d have

saved hundreds of lives in New Orleans.

Thousands in Banda Aceh and Thailand.  Tens or hundreds

of thousands in Myanmar.  Tens or

god-only-knows in Port

au Prince.

______________

Addendum,

January 18th, a week after the quake:

“The World

Food Program also sent

at least three convoys to different locations

badly affected by the earthquake, with a goal of delivering

enough nourishment to last 65,000 people five days. But the scene

at one delivery site suggested that the food — rations of fortified biscuits,

each one about the size of a graham cracker — would hardly last the ravenous

victims one night. And the agency’s distribution methods nearly started

a riot when throngs of people who had lost everything mobbed

one of the trucks in the convoy. “It’s not their fault,”

said Guerrier Ernso, looking on at the mob.

“They are hungry.”

“Mr. Ernso,

a 25-year-old linguistics student,

introduced himself to a World Food Program official

and suggested that it might have been more effective if the agency

had called ahead to advise community leaders that it was coming. Then he

and four other brawny young men dived into the mob and began pulling people

apart. Within five minutes the people had been arranged in three neat lines.

“They have to create another way to deliver food,” Mr. Ernso said

of the World Food Program official, speaking in English.

“The way they are doing it now, they will

not help us out of our

misery.”