Montaigne

“All passions that suffer themselves to be relished and digested are but moderate”. (Michel de Montaigne)

(with apologies for the length; it isn’t possible to summarise this in a paragraph)

The U.N. Economic and Social Council presented its first report on the 17 Sustainable Development Goals towards ending extreme poverty, fighting inequality and tackling climate change by 2030. These are some of the main findings:

The good news:
– The proportion of the world’s population living below the extreme poverty line dropped by more than half between 2002 and 2012. Some 800 million people still live under $1.90 a day.
Fewer children are going hungry. The proportion of children under age 5 who are small for their age owing to malnutrition fell from 33 percent in 2000 to 24 percent in 2014. Still, an estimated 158 million children under age 5 were affected by stunting in 2014.

– Between 1990 and 2015, the global maternal mortality ratio declined by 44 percent to an estimated 216 deaths per 100,000 live births — and the mortality rate of children under age 5 fell by more than half. An estimated 5.9 million children under 5 died in 2015, mostly from preventable diseases.

The not-so-good news
– The share of overweight children under age 5 increased by nearly 20 percent between 2000 and 2014. Approximately 41 million children in this age group worldwide were overweight in 2014; almost half of them lived in Asia.

– Women and girls work longer hours than men and boys and have less time for rest, learning and other activities because they still overwhelmingly do the household chores.

– In 2014, about half the urban population globally was exposed to air pollution levels at least 2.5 times above the standard of safety set by the World Health Organization. Outdoor air pollution in both cities and rural areas is estimated to have caused 3.7 million premature deaths in 2012.

– The incidence of HIV, malaria and tuberculosis declined between 2000 and 2015, although in 2015 2.1 million people were newly infected with HIV, and an estimated 214 million people contracted malaria.

–  In 2013, 59 million children of primary school age and 65 million adolescents of lower secondary age were getting no schooling, most of them girls.

– The births of about 220 million children a year go unrecorded. In the least developed countries, one in two children have not been registered by age 5. This means that everything from getting into school to getting a job becomes a struggle.

I personally think the burgeoning population in less developed countries is a huge problem, given climate change, the threat to harvests, the availability of water, increasing pollution, lack of jobs and shrinking resources. What do you think?

Trump (tweets):”This very expensive global warming bullshit has got to stop. Our planet is freezing, record low temperatures, and our GW scientists are stuck in ice”.”Snowing in Texas and Louisiana, record-setting freezing temperatures throughout the country and beyond. Global warming is an expensive hoax!” (Quoted by Elior Weinberger in the London Review of Books)

Instead of locking up troubled youths American Courts are increasingly ordering them directly into probation. As a result juvenile incarceration has dropped by half in the past 16 years. Typical demands by Courts are “Attend classes on time and regularly, be of good behavior and perform well … be of good citizenship and good conduct.” If the youths don’t comply they are locked up.

Often it is the order, “obey parents and guardians,” that trips up rebellious teens. As soon as they walk out of the door, monitored electronically, many get into trouble, presumably because they are daily associating with their old friends and acquaintances. The majority, mostly colored boys, drop out of school and their likelihood of later being involved in the adult criminal justice system skyrockets. In other words, putting kids in the probation system can lead to further involvement in the justice system, rather than providing an alternative to it. Electronic monitoring, an alternative to detention, is often what leads kids to be detained. (adapted from an article by NPR).

This, like it or not, is where fathers come in. An involved and caring father reads the riot act and gets the son to do something useful, even if it is only a mowing the lawn for neighbors. This way he can earn a bit of pocket money and start to be proud of an achievment, not simply follow the herd (his “friends”). So many teens don’t have fathers around, and I don’t care what the politically correct say, a double-parent act is the best way of getting kids to adulthood; single parenthood is at best a gamble. A mother-father family was designed that way a million years ago for a good reason (and I have no doubt father-father and mother-mother can work as well, although the jury is still out on that one). Success depends on love, involvement, mutual respect and discipline. These are Epicurean attributes, but they are also simply human, caring ones.