UpFront: Brazil

Felix Levine                                                                                                    5/15/14

811                                                                                                                 ELA

Brazil World Cup

            In June of 2014, Brazil will host the prestigious FIFA World Cup. It is always in the headlines of which country will host the World Cup every 4 years. But there always comes lots of controversy. And personally, I don’t agree with many of the things these countries do, and the money they spend, and morally how they treat the workers that have to build these incredibly large and numerous stadiums for an event that lasts barely a month.

            One reason I do not agree morally with how they handle the process of building these stadiums, is how they treat their workers. For example, Brazil is a country that has some very wealthy people, but also some incredibly poor people. Besides what is written in the UpFront magazine article, I have seen so many things on T.V. about the living conditions of some of the people who are working to try to build the stadiums on time. I’ve seen stories on TV that are about how some workers died from building these stadiums. As prestigious as the World Cup is, morally must take over. You cannot put someone or multiple people’s lives in Jeopardy just because you want to play soccer. Soccer is a sport, but humans should be the priority and having someone die, trying to work and make a living building the premises of the World Cup is something that can be avoided, and can just simply not happen. And now it’s gone to about 3 or 4 deaths. Especially since they aren’t sure if the stadiums will be finished on time, workers have to work extra hours.

            A second reason I don’t agree with what is going on is Brazil is the economics behind it. There is no sense of morality when investing their money. Brazil is not a wealthy country, and to be investing, as it says in the UpFront article “$11 Billion” to try to renovate and fix up the stadiums is absolutely ludicrous. And when you see that only 41% of the population graduates from High School nonetheless College, it’s shocking. They should be focusing on investing $11 Billion dollars in their schools and giving more education and once they’ve taken care of that and have extra money to spend, they can use it on trying to make the World Cup or the Olympics an incredible spectacle.

            In conclusion, I don’t agree with the way Brazil has been handling these huge economic and moral decisions. You can’t invest Billions of dollars in to something that has killed people, and eliminates the possibility of investing in things that are actually meaningful such as education. They must get their priorities straight or else they’re going to be headed into a serious debt. And the people of Brazil will be upset that they are still living in poor conditions just because they wanted to make a Soccer tournament look nice. Personally, these don’t match my moral codes and humanity should come before anything else.