5 Comments

You're article, in my view, would make sense if you changed the word 'white' to 'privileged.'

Expand full comment

Something irked me about your article, Terry,

and I put my finger on it. How can someone with all of your travel and life experience define usefulness so myopically? Even if I accept your arguments that "white people" is the most intellectually honest way of characterizing the "majority populations of most of the Western democracies" and that the citizens of these countries offer nothing but indifference, tokenism, and harm toward the developing world (both a stretch), you never defined useful nor useless. It seems to me that your definition of useful is limited to something like "policies or behaviors that demonstrably improve the welfare of the world's poorest and most violent countries." This is all well and good, but to implicitly define this as people's only "use" with the framing that you did makes your article seem like it was written between TikTok videos. Or "cute" as Col. Pat aptly put it.

Who are you spending your free time with, Terry? My best friend just bought his first house and is learning how to caulk, sand, and paint. Someone else I know is starting her own business to help people who suffer from eating disorders. My dad just retired, took a week off, and is now spending 35 hours a week volunteering at a foodbank. You're right in that these people aren't creating change in the Middle East. But damn it Terry, they aren't useless.

Expand full comment

This was the article I didn’t know I needed.

Yes, some people are going to take issue with “white people” being used here. But what I really read it as is liberal democracies in the west, which have a majority of plurality European ancestry.

At some point in the last 30 years, it became unacceptable to believe that we should do anything to mitigate the trials and poverty elsewhere in the world. That people living under authoritarianism should be responsible for their own liberation. That the worlds problems are so difficult and so complex that we not bother. We have become so hopelessly cynical that people view earnestness as dishonest.

While we aggressively look away, we have given the CCP in China a pathway to economic power and rivaling global influence. We’ve turned a blind eye to human rights catastrophes, and have allowed them to experiment with a technology-enabled surveillance state that could be exported throughout autocracies around the world. And we just ignore the threat it poses to us, less someone or some business gets marginally inconvenienced.

Western liberals have lost conviction in their values. We need leaders who have it again, and dare dream to build more.

Expand full comment

This kind of rhetoric is cute but potentially as misinterpreted and inflammatory as Black Lives Matter. People in charge regardless of race, creed, ethnicity, colour or political party will harm any vulnerable demographic. Some people are indeed useless but not due to their skin colour. And all people are selfish, ignorant, and violent, just to varying degrees and subject to amplification when put in position of power. P@

Expand full comment