Time’s Top Picks Were Poor Choices

By James Donahue

Dec. 18, 2005

The naming of the world’s most wealthy citizens, Bill and Melinda Gates, plus Irish rock star Bono (Paul Hewson) as Time Magazine’s “Persons of the Year” was typical in today’s misdirected and misinformed world.

That these three people were selected for their charitable work and activism targeting global poverty and health was all well and good, except that their emphasis was on saving humans instead of saving our dying planet.

It seems that the gravity of the human dilemma still has not been recognized by even the wisest of writers, philosophers, scientists and theologians among us. We are a dying race of humans living on a dying planet and we don’t seem to be aware of it. Do we all have our heads in the sand? Are we afraid to admit what we all subconsciously know but go to great extremes not to talk about?

Time Magazine praised Mr. and Mrs. Gates for building the world’s largest charity, the Gates Foundation boasting a $29 billion endowment that invested in vaccination programs saving an estimated 700,000 lives, donating computers and Internet access to 11,000 libraries, and sponsoring the biggest scholarship fund in history.

Not a penny was spent for the Earth. Think how much good could have been done if the Gates directed money like that into purchasing and shutting down smog generating factories, tearing up the acres and acres of concrete and planting trees. Or perhaps they might have used the money to lobby Congress to adopt Earth friendly legislation instead of the ugly pro-industry bills that have been slipping into law under the Bush Administration.

Instead of this, the Gates saved some 700,000 lives in illiterate and low-income third world countries as part of a mass “we feed they breed” insanity that only serves to intensify the looming crisis that threatens the extinction of us all.

While we admire Bono’s musical talents and his brilliant work as a member of U-2, his work as a social activist coming to the aid of the poor nations of the world and AIDs victims also borders on the fringe of that same “we feed they breed” mentality. That Bono literally charmed and bullied the leaders of the world’s richest countries into forgiving $40 billion in debt owned by the poorest also has a silver lining in that it suggests a form of wealth sharing on a large scale.

It is clear that the Irish singer is a socialist at heart, and we can find no fault in that.

As Psychic Aaron C. Donahue has stated numerous times, people who gain great wealth do so at the expense of others. When someone like Bill Gates earns too much, it means a lot of other people are going without. That there exists extreme wealth and extreme poverty means that the natural state of balance is out of whack.

Should Bono shift his energy slightly from a socialist agenda and into a socialist-Earth friendly agenda, he would be most deserving of the award he has been given.