ENDING INEQUALITY
Let's not go back to the status quo.
by Khaled Mansour
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We have never before been united by one challenge as a human kind. A challenge that we are all aware of. World wars did not involve the whole world, nor does global trade and movement of technology and money benefit everybody on the planet. COVID 19 hit us all, but even though it hit some much more than others.
We cannot save our lives by not living them, by hiding behind fences and guns. There are charts that we must pay more attention to and try to flatten their rising curves; these are the charts of fear, anger, solitude, xenophobia, populism, racism and profiteering.
Many people now tend to think of the other as the enemy, the threat, the one who might be carrying the virus. This is a certain path towards a permanent state of isolation and fear, a state that has been consecrated around the world in the past 20 years with ceaseless wars on terror, rising walls against economic migrants and dramatic inequalities all around us.
The elites are too invested in broken systems while the underclass cannot reform them on their own. The middle class is being squeezed between sold-out elites and burnt-out poor and joining the latter in larger numbers or at least living a very precarious existence.
Let us not go back to the status-quo-ante even if we can. We cannot take the whole system apart and rebuild the world but at least we can focus on one measure: a minimum universal income for all that can provide for basic needs of food, health care and housing. Once people insure this minimum level then we can debate and find solutions for rising inequalities, floods of migrants and violent threats.
Finding solutions for rising inequalities
Khaled Mansour, writer and consultant on issues of human rights, humanitarian aid, and development.
OUR SPEAKER
Khaled Mansour
Khaled Mansour has over 30 years of experience in human rights, global development, humanitarian aid, journalism, and communications. He has worked extensively with civil society and multilateral organizations in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and North America. He has led large, multicultural teams at global, regional and national levels with multi-million-dollar budgets in complex situations at the UN Headquarters in New York and in various countries around the world. His knowledge and experience of global issues have been acquired in many assignments in post-conflict situations and countries in transition, including South Africa (1994-1995), Afghanistan (2000-2002), Iraq.
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Individuals contributed with their image and content in a personal capacity, not as a part of their role in any institution or company listed on this website.
Resources and points of view
Ten lessons for a Post-Pandemic World, a book by Fareed Zakaria
This is How a Society Dies, article in Eudaimonia
America and Britain are Textbook Examples of a New, Gruesome Phenomeon: Rich Nations Self-Destructing Into Poor Failed States.
“Making real the ideals of our country”, an interview in The Economist
Cory Booker, a Democratic senator from New Jersey, on racial justice, fixing racial income inequality—and optimism.
Societies are tearing apart, but they can be brought together, an article in The Economist
We must reduce the social distance between people and focus on shared human traits, says Adam Waytz, author of “The Power of Human”.
