There's a debate going on below about the Gates Foundation. so I thought I'd throw in some excerpts from a recent ABC News television interview where Peter Jennings goes One-on-One with Bill Gates.
The facts are that Gates has identified the world's greatest inequity -- the death of third world children, often from preventable diseases -- and decided to devote almost all his wealth to doing what he can to save their lives. You really have to wonder what sort of person could possibly object to that....
JENNINGS: You have been a big advocate of travel. And you have on occasion said that Americans who spent more time traveling in Africa, for one, would learn something. What would we learn?
GATES: Well I think there is a lot of compassion when you see people in a very tough situation. When you see parents dying of AIDS, you see orphans, you see malaria. If you don't see it — if you are just reading the statistics its hard to relate to and its hard to think of it as something that you need to help change. So actually getting out to India, to Africa, that's critical to me to make sure my foundation is doing effective work and you know renews my commitment to take all the wealth I have and make sure it goes back to causes like world health.
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JENNINGS: And are you very, very aware that your children are terribly privileged? I shouldn't say terribly privileged, very privileged and that you have to fight that with them for the future?
GATES: I think that's one of the biggest challenges that Melinda and I face is that our kids will grow up in a nice house and we don't want them to take things for granted. We're looking forward to taking them on a lot of these foundation trips so that they will see what life really is like for most people on the planet and they'll have an understanding for why we're giving our wealth to those causes.
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JENNINGS: But you could have chosen other issues. Why were so intent in making a difference in communicable diseases?
GATES: Well, I looked at what is the greatest inequity in the world. The U.S. is very oriented towards solving inequity — gender inequity, racial inequity. In fact, you'd have to say, the great inequity is that we let people die of these diseases. We treat their lives as being worth less than a few hundred dollars because that's what it would take to save them. And so there's a huge disparity and bringing the advances in science to those diseases can change that in a big way. So, my goal was to pick the thing I thought was the greatest inequity in the world, focus on that as our top priority and that's world health and then take the greatest challenge for the United States and make that also a priority and that's the work we're doing in education.
