{"id":644635,"date":"2013-02-28T20:52:59","date_gmt":"2013-03-01T01:52:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.ted.com\/?p=71833"},"modified":"2013-02-28T21:04:35","modified_gmt":"2013-03-01T02:04:35","slug":"the-congo-is-not-hopeless-ben-affleck-at-ted2013","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/644635","title":{"rendered":"The Congo is not hopeless: Ben Affleck at TED2013"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Photo:<\/p>\n

Photo: James Duncan Davidson<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

On Sunday night, Ben Affleck accepted the Academy Award on behalf of his film,\u00a0Argo<\/em>, as it was named the Best Picture of 2012. And today, he appeared on the TED2013 stage kicking off Session 10, “Secret Voices.”<\/p>\n

“This is not a TED Talk. I will not be interesting or funny. This will\u00a0not be exciting in any way,” he said. “Though I fee a little bit like Al Gore in the TED headset. He’s not here, is he?”<\/p>\n

And then he gets serious. “At the Academy Awards, I mentioned my wife, and I said: The people we love, we have to work on those relationships,” said Affleck. “The other thing that I work on is Eastern Congo.”<\/p>\n

“I felt like I\u00a0wasn’t doing enough to give back to the world. So I found one of the most damaged,\u00a0suffering places in the world,\u00a0where 1 in 5 children die before the age of 5. It’s a place where a\u00a0million people are displaced, regularly, inside the country. Where there’s the\u00a0worst gender-based violence in the world …\u00a0There are\u00a0a lot of things to lament, particularly in the last 15 years when 5.5 million people died from conflict-related violence.”<\/p>\n

\"TED2013.<\/p>\n

Photo: Ryan Lash<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

As Affleck says, many people object to this number. So he asks us to imagine that the number were 3 million people. Per capita, that would be roughly the equivalent of 12 million people in the United States. “That’s the population of Chicago,\u00a0Boston\u00a0and Philadelphia,” he says.\u00a0”If they had every single person who lived there die,\u00a0we would probably take some steps. There would be a reaction.”<\/p>\n

So why haven’t we responded?<\/p>\n