Ramblings pt. infinity

I'm reading Les Miserables at the moment. Well, not this second, but you get the idea. Anyway, it's been a long process and I'm still not even close. I started somewhere around two months ago and I am a quarter of the way through the book. Despite this, I am a reader. I love it. How else would you explain me reading (and highly enjoying) this book on my own? It's a dense read, but every now and then there are beautiful gems in there. Such as this quote that I read an hour or so ago:

"It has been calculated that what with salvos, royal and military politenesses, courteous exchanges of uproar, signals of etiquette, formalities of roadsteads and citadels, sunrises and sunsets, saluted every day by all fortresses and all ships of war, openings and closings of ports, etc., the civilized world, discharged all over the earth, in the course of four and twenty hours, one hundred and fifty thousand useless shots. At six francs the shot, that comes to nine hundred thousand francs a day, three hundred millions a year, which vanish in smoke. This is a mere detail. All this time the poor were dying of hunger."

This got me thinking. Normally I stay out of any sort of discussion about budgets (unless it's about our household) and politics, but I honestly started thinking of what better uses of resources there are out there than a lot of what we do. I mean, surely there are useless traditions or something that can be cut out. But what do I know? I'm just a citizen with zero knowledge of economics.

At work a therapist Scott was kind of addressing this same issue. He noticed that people try desperately to raise money to find cures for diseases that affect a very small percentage of the population while widespread problems go ignored. His example was dysentery: there are plenty of ways to treat it and plenty of people affected. Why does the government grant millions to research new technology and cures when they don't even use the ones they have? At the time I kind of laughed it off, but thinking about it now it kind of makes sense.

I am rambling. I know it. I'm not trying to make any sort of point. Maybe just an urge that there are people out there who need us and there are ways we can help if we just look outside of ourselves and break our routines every once in a while. We may be surprised by what shows up.