The World I Imagine: 11/06/08

The World I Imagine is the second book by Debbie Jordan I've read and reviewed this year. The first was a novel, Lion's Pride.

The World I Imagine is Debbie Jordan's manifesto. She calls it her "creative manual for ending poverty and building peace."

The project began with a poem written in 1989. She called it "Ode to War (Or: Peace is Dull)" and she starts the book with her poem. From there Jordan outlines the problems she sees with the world and how she thinks they can be fixed. Her ultimate goal is end poverty to bring about world peace.

Jordan divides her plan to end poverty into a number of essays. Each chapter is a different piece of the over all puzzle. She has suggestions for meeting all the basic needs to support a comfortable life (though she doesn't suggest what those needs are), how to pay for this distribution of the basics, universal employment, how to administer society on a global scale, governing politics, establishing democracy, providing universal education, universal health care, justice and finally civil rights.

While I agree with Debbie Jordan's political views, her manifest is naive and flawed. While many of her suggestions might work (in modified form). Her vision for the world seems to assume that the whole world works like the United States. It doesn't. If we are to truly make the effort to meet the needs of the world's people we must be willing to take in account the myriad of cultures, no matter how alien they may seem to us.

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