A sense of values
Today in the Media Network Weblog we published the sad story of Swiss NGO Media Action International, which is winding up its operations because nobody wants to fund its administration. Now, we're not talking about the sort of NGO that flies its executives around the world in First Class. MAI has been run by two full time staff and a lot of volunteers from the media industry.
At the same time, we read that the Dutch are spending 50 million euro this year on fireworks to celebrate the New Year. The Dutch have a fascination with fireworks bordering on the obsessive. Despite attempts to regulate the sale and use of fireworks, the first bangs started in my area in the third week of November, and have been heard on a daily basis ever since. If past experience is anything to go by, the last bangs will die out around the 7th or 8th of January. Pity people with bad nerves or a pet cat. Unfortunately nobody seems to care about each other any more.
These two things - collectively wasting 50 million euro on things that are at best useless and at worst downright annoying (and dangerous), and being unwilling to fund an organisation that does humanitarian work through the media in areas of real crisis - suggests to me that we have our sense of values all wrong.
I don't make New Year's resolutions, but I will make a wish: that people start to think more seriously about helping others and a little less about their own pleasure. The Dutch are some of the most generous people in the world when it comes to giving to charity, so nobody begrudges them a bit of pleasure, however hedonistic. But there are limits. The 50 million euro the Dutch spend on fireworks would solve Radio Netherlands' funding problems for quite a few years. It saddens me to see so much hard-earned cash literally go up in smoke!
8:05:10 PM 
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