Word Choices

I am not sure how I feel about the Singer article, but as this is supposed to be a reflection, I'll try to put my thoughts out here. On one hand I do agree with Singer in that a solution to the dilemma needs to be found, but I don't think his approach to solving it is a good idea. He seems to get caught up on the small details, and keeps going back to the idea of the 200$. I think it was the 200$ that really stuck out to me as strange. It was an estimate for a small scale donation, yet he continued to use that in figures on a much grander scale, and he is vague on what that 200$ means. Is that just for necessary vaccinations? Will that include food, clean water, clothes, protection from harm, etc? It seems unlikely that that small an amount of money would fix anything, let alone world poverty. 

And equating human life to 200$ is really iffy in the first place. Just because you save a child from one problem doesn't mean you have saved them from all, and I think the idea of expressing an individual person as just a number dumbs down the issue and takes away from solving it in the first place. Throwing money into a charity by guilt tripping people and claiming that they will have to give up a large portion of their income in order to be a decent human being is like trying to fix a burst pipe by convincing people to buy Dixie cups to catch the water. We need to replace the pipe, so to speak, or at least whip out the duct tape. I am not an expert on this by any means, and I really don't know how to help a developing country or fix poverty, but I think that the way to fix it really isn't going to be in small scale donations, but in promoting education and industry. To do that, I agree that we need to do something big, like he kind of gets at near the end, but he tries to make it too personal. He seems to get the idea that the phrase "it affects everyone" means that everybody has to take it into their own hands individually, rather than working together. I think that my main problem was the way he kept using semantics to make it seem like it was the reader's fault, when I think he should have been calling for change at a higher level, something greater than just donating money.