[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="240" caption="Image by Norman B. Leventhal Map Center at the BPL via Flickr"]

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In our world, it is difficult to construct a unilinear narrative. There are so many competing stories and images to grab our attention that anything like "meaning" is quickly lost. This is particularly true in the "news" industry where there is almost never any larger story about why people are killing other people in Afghanistan, in high schools, in their own homes, why there's no world reaction to melting ice caps, record salaries and bonuses on Wall Street, starving children.
Sometimes I like to play a game called stream-of-consciousness mapping. I pick two or three stories and ask "How are these related?" It makes the news both more interesting, but also more meaningful.
Two stories in today's paper are a case in point: a record 1 billion plus human beings are hungry and General McCrystal will request
60,000 more troops in Afghanistan.
CBC News - World - Undernourished surpass 1 billion: UN.
So let's see. According to a UN report,
The ranks of the world's hungry has surpassed one billion, and declining aid and investment in agriculture are expected to steadily increase the number of undernourished people for more than a decade.
And the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which according to
costofwar.com is already over $920,000,000,000, might go ahead and get bigger and costlier. I am not, you'll notice, even mentioning the human costs (since today's game only involves two stories).
Certain among you will say "America's safety is on the line" but isn't our safety undermined by people who are hungry and desperate? Isn't one of the major reasons people join the Taliban or al Qaeda or any other militant group because they're desperate and it seems like a such a group will allow a more secure future (even if that future is in the afterlife)?
This stream-of consciousness question asking is part of the game. Right now these questions pop into my mind:
And why isn't a record number of hungry people an issue of national security?
And why isn't the cost of war a threat to our national security?
And as unethical as the Taliban might be or Al Qaeda, how unethical is it to spend money on war instead of investment in agriculture so people can eat?
Oh, but wait, here's another story to add to the stream-of consciousness mapping: the
Feds are trying to stop AIG from paying out another $198 million in bonuses to the very employees who helped create the global economic meltdown that helped inflate food and fuel prices, forcing desperately poor people to sell their meager belongings and be even less able to farm AND lessened agricultural aid given by wealthier nations.
Why are AIG employees not making the connections that are so obvious between their greed and a record number of people hungry in the world?
When I explained this game to a colleague who writes about the mentally ill, he told me it wasn't stream-of-consciousness mapping, but schizophrenic. Apparently, as a mental illness, schizophrenia tends to create connections where none are there.
Perhaps he's right. Perhaps these lines can't be drawn. Perhaps there is no relationship between AIG, the wars, and a record number of hungry people.
Or perhaps only by drawing them ourselves and not relying on the news industry, which "for some reason" (what is it, I wonder, and is it related to profit or a national culture of attention deficit disorder?) can we construct a map of the world and a more sane way of getting from here to there.