先日、ある人の何気ないツイートから↓の記事に辿り着いた。


英紙「日本という国を過小評価していないか」アメリカも中国も到底かなわないと取り上げ話題に

そして最後は、

「日本が多くの問題を抱えていることは身を持って実感していると思いますが、良いところ、恵まれているところがあるということも、他国との比較からもっと認識しておいてもいいのではないでしょうか。」

と締めくくられている。

確かに…

別に反論するところはありません…

でも…何か引っかかる

以前、話題になった「世界がもし100人の村だったら」の時と同じ感覚だ！

この時も教職員やメディアはこぞってこう締めくくっていた…

「私たち日本人は恵まれているんだ！」

でも…

私がこの話を初めて聞いた時の解釈は違った。

STATE OF THE VILLAGE REPORT

If the world were a village of 1000 people:
584 would be Asians
123 would be Africans
95 would be East and West Europeans
84 Latin Americans
55 Soviets (still including for the moment Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, etc.)
52 North Americans
6 Australians and New Zealanders

The people of the village would have considerable difficulty communicating:
165 people would speak Mandarin
86 would speak English
83 Hindi/Urdu
64 Spanish
58 Russian
37 Arabic
That list accounts for the mother-tongues of only half the villagers. The other half speak (in descending order of frequency) Bengali, Portuguese, Indonesian, Japanese, German, French, and 200 other languages.
In the village there would be:
300 Christians (183 Catholics, 84 Protestants, 33 Orthodox)=
175 Moslems
128 Hindus
55 Buddhists
47 Animists
210 all other religions (including atheists)

One-third (330) of the people in the village would be children. Half the children would be immunized against the preventable infectious diseases such as measles and polio.
Sixty of the thousand villagers would be over the age of 65.
Just under half of the married women would have access to and be using modern contraceptives.
Each year 28 babies would be born.
Each year 10 people would die, three of them for lack of food, one from cancer. Two of the deaths would be to
babies born within the year.
One person in the village would be infected with the HIV virus; that person would most likely not yet have developed a full-blown case of AIDS.
With the 28 births and 10 deaths, the population of the village in the next year would be 1018.

In this thousand-person community, 200 people would receive three-fourths of the income; another 200 would receive only 2% of the income.
Only 70 people would own an automobile (some of them more than one automobile).
About one-third would not have access to clean, safe drinking water.
Of the 670 adults in the village half would be illiterate.

The village would have 6 acres of land per person, 6000 acres in all of which:
700 acres is cropland
1400 acres pasture
1900 acres woodland
2000 acres desert, tundra, pavement, and other wasteland.
The woodland would be declining rapidly; the wasteland increasing; the other land categories would be roughly stable. The village would allocate 83 percent of its fertilizer to 40 percent of its cropland -- that owned by the richest and best-fed 270 people. Excess fertilizer running off this land would cause pollution in lakes and wells. The remaining 60 percent of the land, with its 17 percent of the fertilizer, would produce 28 percent of the foodgrain and feed 73 percent of the people. The average grain yield on that land would be one-third the yields gotten by the richer villagers.

If the world were a village of 1000 persons, there would be five soldiers, seven teachers, one doctor. Of the village's total annual expenditures of just over $3 million per year, $181,000 would go for weapons and warfare, $159,000 for education, $132,000 for health care.

The village would have buried beneath it enough explosive power in nuclear weapons to blow itself to smithereens many times over. These weapons would be under the control of just 100 of the people. The other 900 people would be watching them with deep anxiety, wondering whether the 100 can learn to get along together, and if they do, whether they might set off the weapons anyway through inattention or technical bungling, and if they ever decide to dismantle the weapons, where in the village they will dispose of the dangerous radioactive materials of which the weapons are made.

英語だとわかんないよね…

詳しくは↓を読んで下さい。
世界がもし100人の村だったら ／If the world were a village of 100 people

昨日のブログに知人からコメントがありました。

私も全く同感です。

確かに、世界にはもっと酷い現実がたくさんあることも知っています。

それと比較すれば、確かに私たち日本人の多くは幸せと言えるのかもしれません。

でも、この20年で確実に日本人の人に対する尊厳や平等といった普遍的な価値観が崩れてきた感じがします。

このままで良いなんて誰も思ってはいないと思いますが、思考を停止して目を閉じてしまえば、同じ事だと思います。

まずは気付き、そして行動することが大切かと思います。

最近、Malcolm-X の言葉が響きます。

中流家庭に育ったはずの自分に…

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