Last week, my fellow Observers, The United Nations held The Sustainable Development Summit, a culmination of two years of consultation and development. The agenda of the summit focused on the lofty goals to eradicate poverty, hunger, better protection of the environment, improvement on promoting human rights, gender equality, empower women, ways to strive for peaceful, inclusive societies and fight against inequalities worldwide. With most members attending, it was considered a high level plenary meeting of the general assembly.
The United States had joined with other world leaders to commit to the 2030 deadline to achieve these goals as much as possible. By adopting the framework of this summit's proposals over the next fifteen years, President Obama announced new targets for AIDS relief, peace initiatives such as The International Day of Peace and diplomatic solutions to military actions. The U.S. also joined members of The Open Government Partnership with the president signing a Declaration of Importance pertaining to reaching the agenda's goals. The declaration focuses on the need for citizen participation, availability of information, transparency, accountability and access to justice.
Pretty impressive ambitions, wouldn't you say? A majority of countries, including the U.S., pursuing a 15 year commitment to end poverty? Even if they don't achieve it (and they probably won't) the ramifications of the effort alone should certainly attain some good. The sad part is that even though this summit should have been front page, top internet search engine news, most people didn't hear much or anything about it. The sadder part is that most news organizations and journalists decided to focus their energy on McDonald's offering their breakfast menu all day nationally in it's restaurants instead. Don't believe it, my loyal reader? Feel free to check Bing or Google search results yourself, but prepare yourself because it's not pretty. Searching through Bing, with my setting on "anytime", UN Summit 2015's 1st page list of results included UN.org, Aircrap.org, New American, Wikipedia, who.int, and several other obscure sites before it lists the LA Daily News, The Vancouver Sun and eventually an offshoot article from the New York Times. Adding the variant "Sustainable Development" to my search brought up sites from India, The International Insider and Reuters.com. Pretty disappointing, if you ask me. It's as if the media doesn't even want to try to cover the story let alone putting any effort into doing so. My efforts, however, in my search queries required me to type in the entire phrase "United Nations Summit 2015" then hit enter with no suggestions popping up under the search field. I hope you fare better. If your curiosity is peaked and your conducting your own search, I suggest you type "McDonald's all day breakfast" in the search field and see what happens. I got to the "a" in "all" before an endless scroll of search suggestions popped up. When clicking on the top choice an alphabet soup of a media laundry list spread out across my screen. CNN, The Chicago Tribune, Fox, ABC, CBS, Time, CNBC, International Business Times, Fortune, Christian Science Monitor (my favorite, I guess god likes hot cakes for dinner), USA Today, Nasdaq.com, The Business Journal, on and on and on. Positive or negative, it just kept going and going. Not only on news sites, social as well. Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, Yahoo, Google, again, on and on. I felt it was very ironic that the media frenzy that overshadowed the UN summit's general assembly, one of who's pivotal topics on their agenda was promoting peace, surrounded a company that wouldn't collaborate with Burger King to create a "Peace" burger for The International Day of Peace.
If you tried my little experiment and feel just as dismayed as I did when you discovered the results, you, like myself, unfortunately are in the minority on this one. There is a disheartening truth to why most people don't know what happened at the UN last week. They didn't want to know and couldn't have cared less. Even though we like to put blame on the media, it realistically falls on the public it serves. News is a business and media is a moneymaker with endless competition amongst itself. They constantly conduct surveys that focus on viewers and readers interests and cater to the demographic results they uncover. (That explains why Entertainment Tonight has been around for so long). Quite simply, they give the people what they want. Well, it seems that the public doesn't want to know anything about the actions being taken against poverty, disease, human rights or inequalities. I suppose it's just too depressing and we don't want to think about it. What we do want to know is how McDonald's is going to help our depression about not being able to get an Egg McMuffin at 7:39 pm. What are you going to do about that.... huh, McD's? Are you gonna offer up some breakfast parfait Prozac, or what?
What gets to me is that for every one comment I've seen about the summit, I've seen a hundred about McDonald's all day breakfast, primarily on the fore mentioned social platform. Another thing I noticed, when I did come across a comment on the summit, it was almost always negative. Most people think that sustainable development is a waste of time, money and we should be focusing on our own country instead of trying to join forces with other nations to solve our domestic problems. Now, I'm a firm believer in the saying "Charity begins at home", but after decades of looking to our government and citizens to solve even some of our social issues and being sadly disappointed in the limited to non-existent results, I'm very interested in what a joint effort with other countries that face the same situations might accomplish. Sadly, since most of the UN member countries have more serious problems within their populations than we do, I don't expect it to do much more than what we have already attempted so far. It's still, however, a fresh approach to the "world's" needs instead of just our own. I like that. It's a first step towards looking at the world as a community sharing the same tribulations as a combined entity instead of retreating to the narrow minded philosophy of "this" country or "that" country. It is a cause to hold a little bit of hope that "them" and "us" may one day evolve into "we".
To be fair, McDonald's all day breakfast has received it's fair share of negative feedback as well. Most of which having to do with consumers being sadly disappointed in the limited "all day breakfast" selections they have. @bisciutlover1153 is frowny faced because she can only have an Egg Mc"Muffin". Sorry, @eggwhitedelited and @mcgriddlemaniac, you'll have to pick something else or wait until 5 am. #WhyyyyyyMcdsalldaybfastWhyyyyyy??? It may sound ludicrous, but at least these people are discussing the situation. There's a lot more of them than the ones engaging each other over the current UN summit, sad to say.
I absolutely loathe when someone asks me if I know what's wrong with this country because I know they're going to tell me and it's hardly ever of any use to me. More often than not it's either a liberal or conservative dogma laced tangent that's designed by the speaker to assault my ears for the better part of ten minutes and ends up leaving me bankrupt for an ideal of the opinion I just suffered. Just like McDonald's all day breakfast, we constantly let our attention to serious problems be distracted by the things that have no meaning to the betterment of our society. We waste our time and thoughts with trivial trinkets of social dysfunction and never focus our attention on crucial matters. If we are to progress at all as a race on this planet, we need to change the station on the social radio we've been listening to and stop dancing to the decadent music it's playing. Strictly an Observation. If you'll excuse me, I'm sending some hash browns to the UN.
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