Issues, Reactions and Challenging

<Ben steps on personal soapbox>

Thought I would make some comments
about the state of affairs in the world, our reaction to it and where
do we go from here.

Every time I tune into global news via
the net, or tv it seems something is going wrong. Whether global
warming, poverty, conflict, foreign policy, resource supply &
demand, diseases, third world debt, lack of education or bad
governance. Even that sentence doesn’t justice to the range of issues
and problems to be solved. The sheer enormity of the ills of the
world can be tracked minute by minute, commented upon and clicked
into, over and around.

In many respects the flow of issues is
like a tap, we can turn it off, filter it so only certain issues get
through or we could switch on and let the cold flow of reality wake
us up out of our comfortable daze. I’m so guilty of filtering the
stream and settling for a briefest touch in my locality, in a sense
losing the vision of changing the world for the better. The status
quo can’t be good enough, it wasn’t good enough 20th
century figures such as Albert Einstein,
Mikhail Gorbachev, Tim Berners-Lee, Ronald Reagan,
Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, Mao Zedong, Franklin Delano
Roosevelt, Mohandas Gandhi or Nelson Mandela.
But perhaps further discussion of leaders, revolutionaries, free
thinkers and world changers should be held in the forums.

So we
wake the challenge of fixing the world, of selecting achievable short
term goals and far reaching long term visions. The people who you
need to inspire to action, so that you may inherit the results, will
be at the World Economic Forum 08. British Council will facilitate
the forum in London but the voice of youth to the issues of the world
will be truly yours and it will be preciously carried to Switzerland
so that our collective global leaders can hear it and response.

<end
soapbox rant>