issue 56

togfzUID: 2604776

TOPIC: ISSUE56 - "Governments should focus more on solving the immediate problems of today rather than trying to solve the anticipated problems of the future."
WORDS: 459
TIME: 00:50:00
DATE: 2009-7-20 9:19:51

In modern world, with population increase, more and more resources are necessary to meet people's need. However the resources are limited for the whole world, society, and country, the government should allocate resources properly to meet people's demand and make people live a decent life. Some people hold the opinion that government should pay more attention on solving the immediate problems rather than solving the problems of future.
However, in my opinion, due to the limited resources we possess, governments should focus on current problems and future problems.

Firstly, government should make up to deal with immediate problems that are so urgent and crucial. There are two kinds of problems: urgent and not urgent. Confronting urgent problems, government should tackle them immediately, because urgent problems usually relate to people's exist and life. If this kind of problem cannot be solved quickly and appositely, the safety of people's life is in danger. For example, in a village of Tibet, villages suffered from water pollution that was caused by a gold mine nearby. Moreover, many villagers got sick with strange symptom. Last month I tested the PH value of water in their village, and it showed that the value is three. That means that people may be in danger if they drink this water in long term. One week ago, government closed the gold mine and sent villages to hospital. Like these kind of problems, government should deal with the problems with great effort and swift act.

Secondly, government should think about the problems that will happen in future. Since our offspring will live in earth, we should not leave a terrible earth without available resources. In order to keep a suitable environment for our offspring, the government should pay money on research concerning the problems in future including global warming, sustainable development, and take strong methods to solve these problems. If government ignores the problems in future, just solving current problems, it will lead to disastrous results. For instance, if government do not decrease the emission of carbon dioxide and adopt clean energy, more and more carbon dioxide that cause greenhouse effect will exist in atmosphere, the temperature of earth will rise. That can lead to sea level rise that can destroy many famous and important cities like New York, Tokyo, and increase of extreme weather events like hurricane, long time drought, and the breakout of vital disease. Therefore, government should consider these problems and take measures to deal with them.
To sum up, it is a complex issue on how to balance the benefits between present generation and the next generation. The government should deal with current and future problems, both of them are essential. So it is really hard to say that government should focus more on which.