Driving Votes: Matt's Blog - Archived Entry

Things have been busy at work lately. On one hand, I love my job at Microsoft because technology enables people to do incredible things, like what we're doing with Driving Votes. On the other hand, it's hard for me to feel like my job is important when people like George Bush are putting the future of the planet in danger.

On Friday, my dear friend Jesse, an old buddy from Brown University who co-founded a start-up company with me in 1998, invited me to the senior banquet dinner at the Waldorf (alternative) school where he teaches a few blocks from my house. The seniors got to plan and run the banquet, and they had decided to allocate the food at the banquet the same way food is allocated in the world. So out of a group of 50 people, 5 people got to eat luxurious "first world" meals, about 15 people ate "second world" meals, and the remaining 30 people ate "third world" meals-- in other words, we got a bowl of rice and were malnourished or starving. This was a far cry from the senior year social events we put on at my high school in Topeka, Kansas.

In Topeka, Kansas the rest of the world seems very far away. Many of my friends came from Republican families, and they were good families with good people. I always wondered how these people, especially the farmers in Kansas that have been screwed over and over again by the Republicans and their agribusiness, would always vote Replublican. I have some ideas about why these good people still vote Republican, and I think these are the ideas that I'll explore in this blog as we prepare for our trip and then travel across the country.

Back to Jesse's alternative high school though, a father of one of the students stood up at the end of the dinner and quoted an astounding statistic. He said that Bush is proposing a $435 billion dollar budget for our military next year. Then he told us that it would only cost $20 billion dollars to feed every single person that was hungry in the world for one year. I'm not sure if these numbers are accurate, but even if it cost twenty times that much to feed the world, I was left with one question.

Would it make us safer to feed the rest of the planet or bomb the rest of the planet? I know which option George Bush would choose, and that's why we have to get him out.