Dehumanization and Crises

"What is good for the people?" Simple question really, and very relevant in an election climate. At least, it should be simple, but there is alot of context here. Who are these people? Clearly the nearly 50% of people on the earth who live on less then $2 a day aren't part of the equation. The words "Middle Class" get thrown around alot, but from my "Middle Class" class is probably different from your middle class, and there are all kinds of electricians, construction workers, and yes, even plumbers, who call themselves middle class who are essentially in a different class than lawyers and doctors and financial bankers. Can something be good for all these people? That seems unlikely but arguable.

The thing that urks me is that "the people" usually pertains not to the very low class people in the US or the rest of the world. Fast food workers, stock boys, janitors. In academia (and I know this from personal experience), "the people" is more likely to mean "people like us": educated, relatively well off, looking to move up in the world and buy a house and settle down. For us, there is no question that one day we will have a career, have a dog, have a wife, have some kids, have a mid-life crisis and then have a sports car. There is some distinction between "people" and ordinary people, who are seen as rare and below the radar, unhelpable in some way, inevitable in some way, who don't expect any boon from the usual political process.

This distinction can be clearly seen in the treatment of perceived "crises". There are literally millions of people in this country, around 16%, without basic health insurance in this country--the majority of which are natives, and the vast majority of which are member's of families where are least one person is working full-time. And that doesn't include the many, many that are under-insured, whether they know it or not. But its a matter of the system--we can't afford the money to insure everyone, its a consequence of fair capitalism that some will miss out while other's buy their third car or their second yacht. Not a crisis. But when, say, some banks are on the verge of collapse because of bad investments, and this threatens the foundation of our economy, the government finds 850 billion dollars under its mattress.

I'm not saying that the bailout, or whatever you want to call it, wasn't necessary. It would have harmed more than dumb investment bankers and legalized lown sharks, it would have hurt anyone who needed to borrow for anything, be it a house, a car, college tuition, or a fridge. But its certainly no less a crisis than American Citizens dieing of curable diseases. Or, if you want to be a hard-nosed capitalist about the whole thing, children who haven't even had a chance to prove their own merit are dieing of curable diseases. And it makes me a little sick to emphasis the American Citizen thing, because that leaves out the two billion people on the planet who live every day of their lives without basic sanitation through no fault of their own.

There's no money for these things, though. They are a natural consequences of a system we are led to believe is ultimately the best we can do. But I was led to believe that market crashes and recessions were also a part of that system. But when "crisis" strikes, our romanticism of capitalism flies out the door; as John Stewart puts it, we've privatized gains and socialized losses. And underlying all of this is the dehumanization of the great majority of human beings on this planet.

When a child lives on the street, gets rapped, starves to death, dies tragically, then certain questions become relevant. Surely this wasn't a wealthy kid with a bright future? Was he black? Low class? African? Slowly we push the true victims into the background until they become a statistic. Its not like Johnny, that kid you knew growing up who was pretty fast and who laughed alot and got heartbroken by his first breakup and wanted to be a doctor when he grew up, it wasn't him that ended up dieing of some easily curable disease or contracted AIDs because he was rapped. It was just an African boy in the middle of the dessert.

What I'm describing isn't a conscious decision. It's subtle and insidious because it's just too much sometimes to absorb the totality of human suffering, so we personalize it and write the rest of as, "just part of the system." But this needs to change. Because right this second a mother, not too unlike your own mother, is starving to death and is trying to decide which of her children, children that are not unlike your brothers and sisters and you, will have to be abandoned so that the others will survive for another month. This is the real crisis.