It’s the middle of February now—how are you doing on those New Year’s Resolutions? If you’re like me, and love to set goals, you probably concocted a long list of things to do, achieve, eradicate, and solve in 2009. If you’re like me, you also probably have declined to take action on many of them in favor of sitting on the couch. It’s not that I don’t care about my goals any more. It’s just that sitting on the couch is so pleasant, and taking action is, well, hard.

But the difficulty of my resolutions is nothing compared with the plans of the United Nation’s Millennium Development Goals. These aren’t just New Year’s resolutions, these are New Millennium resolutions. Adopted in 2000, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are ambitious in the extreme. End poverty and hunger. Ensure universal primary education, and equal access to education for girls. Reduce child and maternal mortality and combat HIV/AIDS. Promote and ensure environmental sustainability, access to safe drinking water, and open access to the market for developing nations. Oh, and all these things are supposed to be achieved by 2015.

I don’t mean to be a cynic, but it’s 2009. 2015 is only six years, two World Cups, and two Harry Potter movies away. It took me nearly six years to graduate from college, so I am just a little bit skeptical that plans as grand as the MDGs are achievable in just over half a decade. It would seem impossible in the best of times, but now, with the global economy still in a free-fall, extreme poverty is actually increasing.

This isn’t to say that they haven’t made any progress. Given the enormity of the goals and the brevity of the time span, the numerous agencies working on the MDGs have made some remarkable changes. They have halved the number of people living in extreme poverty in East Asia. They have provided widespread measles immunization in Northern Africa and Latin America. They have increased access to clean drinking water in urban areas around the globe. Clearly there is cause to celebrate, but the end is nowhere near in sight.

There are 20 specific goals, and Sub-Saharan Africa has improved on none of them. No region on Earth reports progress in all 20 areas, and many of the problems are worsening instead of improving. What is going wrong? In an incredibly thorough report Investing in Development: A Practical Plan to Achieve the Millennium Development Goals, issued in 2005, Professor Jeffrey D. Sachs and his coauthors walk through the current state of affairs in all the target regions, and discusses what is working and what isn’t. They identify four major contributors to lack of progress: governance failures, poor geographical conditions, pockets of poverty in otherwise middle-income nations, and “poverty traps”, their term for countries too poor to help themselves.

These pitfalls are obviously hugely obstructive to improvement, but I believe, perhaps naively, that they can be rendered obsolete. All it would take would be one monumentally simple but impossibly difficult act: getting the people to care. History has proven time and again that any adversity can be overcome if enough human souls are dedicated to overcoming it. But the larger the obstacle the more people are needed, and the eradication of poverty world-wide is about as big an obstacle as there is.

The other problem with getting the people to care is, in almost all cases, the care of the people affected by the crisis is not enough. If there is a government which needs overthrowing or a revolution that needs starting, a group of sufficiently angry people is often adequate. But most of the time, those in trouble are unseen enough that their voices alone go unheard. The abolition of slavery in the United States took not just the efforts of black abolitionists and the slaves themselves, it also took the work and passion of white Northerners whose everyday lives weren’t affected by slavery one way or the other. Female suffragists campaigned tirelessly and nobly to get the vote for women, but ultimately it was up to male government officials to make it a reality.

Last semester I took a gender studies class, and in one session we broke into small groups to discuss gay marriage. After an inconclusive discussion in my group, a classmate announced, “Well, it doesn’t affect me, so I guess I don’t really care.” At the time I was offended by her comment, but of course I am guilty of the same apathy towards issues which don’t affect me. While I do think people are naturally empathetic, it is difficult to turn empathy into action.

The problem with the Millennium Development Goals is not only that they don’t directly affect those of us in the best position to make a difference, but also that many of us are completely unaware of the true scope of the problem. How many Americans and Canadians do you suppose have heard of the MDGs? How many Western Europeans are insisting that their governments put more time and money into their realization? How many Japanese and Australian citizens use poverty eradication as a primary factor in their voting decision making? We all feel sadness when we see a picture of a starving orphan, but when poverty isn’t staring us in the face it is all too easy to forget about it.

I do believe large-scale caring about the MDGs would be the most powerful agent to seeing them achieved. I do not, however, have any clue as to how to make manifest this caring in people the world over. The most powerful governments will only take strong action if their citizens insist upon it. The economic crisis has paralyzed many with fear, and it seems unlikely that the concerns of the poorest billion folks on the planet will occupy much of our thoughts until it is over. I think it is unwise, however, to assume that once the economy is on its way up the MDGs will achieve themselves. Poverty has existed as long as civilization has. Its eradication is going to take more than some random acts of kindness during the good times.

I don’t have any answers. I have only questions. Evolutionarily, it makes sense for us to care for one another, and I think this is the biological basis for empathy. But why does empathy sometimes motivate us to action and sometimes pass without a second thought? What will it take to convince the wealthiest in the world to help the poorest? We know our strength, and what we are capable of when we join together. What is stopping us?

To learn more about the Millennium Development Goals, please visit http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals