The Real Disaster

The tragedy in New Orleans will appropriately shine a light on the dark, not-so-secret, secret of poverty in the US. We will all begin to talk about how to re-build the Gulf Coast -- and debate about how to deal with the plight of the poor, and their employment, education, support services, and so on. Maybe this is a long overdue discussion. Maybe action is even more overdue. But for all our sympathy, for all our ideas, for all our actions – what will not be discussed or acted upon (what is never dealt with in America) is that the poor, the disenfranchised, the underprivileged, the class of people stuck at the economic bottom -- are an essential part of the system. The poor are not a sad accident. Their existence is premeditated. For cities like New Orleans to function, for the entire world economy to work, there needs to be a permanent underclass.

By saying this, I am not advocating or justifying the existence of poverty – far from it. What I am saying is that every American who now lives a prosperous or comfortable life, does so because there are poor and destitute people. Whatever level of wealth you may enjoy, do not fool yourself into thinking it is due solely to your hard work and sacrifice and, therefore, deserved by you. No, your prosperity exists because of, and in proportion to, someone else’s suffering, and deprivation. In the US, and even more so globally, our prosperity causes poverty, and then thrives because of it. If all poverty could be eliminated in this country, there would simply and necessarily be a counter-balancing increase in the numbers of underclass in other parts of the world. Whenever a few people take more, a whole lot of other people must receive less.

The simple equation is that without the existence of those people with less, there can be none who have more. This is as it is intended. Material wealth is purposely exclusive and comparative. We are conditioned to believe that as long as we have more wealth than someone else, we are better than them – and not just better financially but better overall. We are taught that lack of wealth not only equals lack of success and social status, but that it is evidence of one’s lack of worth as a human being. We have learned to define ourselves, and our self-respect, by what we do for a living, what our income level is, and the amount and quality of our material possessions – and we have learned to judge others by theirs. “Rich people are smart, industrious, and deserving, -- and poor people are dumb, lazy, and undeserving”. We may be appalled by the lack of response to the desperate people at the Convention Center in New Orleans, but we should not be surprised. They were ignored, not so much because of their race, but because of their class. The economics of our society demands that the underclass remain underfed, underprivileged and, in this case, underwater and gasping for life.

The masses of people on the bottom, the “underprivileged”, are always promised a place at the top by the overprivileged people in charge. Although a tiny few of the poor may be allowed to climb up (assuming they work hard enough at toeing the line), the rest will never get there. For them, rising to the top is impossible. Any pyramid needs a huge mass at the bottom to hold up the top, which is why illegal Ponzi scams are called “pyramid schemes”. In those con games, people are promised a huge return on their investment if they can get 10 more people to join. But there are never enough people to come in at the bottom investment level to enable those above to recoup their money, let alone, reap the promised riches. Only the creators of the scheme get any money at all – and they have been known to dupe people out of millions. This is exactly how our American, capitalistic economic system is built.

Like the gullible people taken in by pyramid schemes, we have all been indoctrinated to believe that this system of competitive enterprise is fair and just – so much so that we actually try to export the idea. We claim to want everyone in the world to enjoy the same freedoms and fruits of capitalism that we do, but we fight wars to prevent them from obtaining the necessary resources to do so. For some reason (and I think our religious indoctrination might be to blame), too many of us actually believe that the world was created and reserved entirely for Americans. This mind-set of divinely ordained privilege has been so ingrained in everyone raised in America, that even the people who, historically, have been relegated to the bottom of the pyramid (i.e., women and minorities) are willing to fight to the death to be allowed the chance to climb it.

For the entire history of America, downtrodden people have fought to join the very system that oppressed them. Their reasoning is clear: If white men do it and live in comfort, then everyone else has the right to do it too. In other words; everyone should have an equal right to work at acquiring more than their share of the world. Most people have come to believe that working toward this goal amounts to great social progress. Certainly, fighting to climb up from having nothing, to obtaining your fair share, is indeed heroic. Seeking more than that, however, is not. (It should be noted that throughout our history, a few activists have fought for the innate right of everyone to have an equal share of the world, not simply an equal right to exploit it. Most of those people were either jailed, or killed).

What has been overlooked in the ongoing battle for the right to climb up the economic pyramid, is that no one deserves more than their fair share, and no one deserves less. No one deserves to be deprived -- for any reason. Hard work does not equate to wealth and privilege, or else some dirt farmer in Bangladesh would be the richest person in the world. What is also conveniently overlooked, in the quest for equal rights, is the cold fact that any of us who currently have exercised those rights, and acquired more than our share of the world, have gained that excess at the expense of someone else’s share – someone who may have died as a result.

Leftists, liberals, progressives, and Democrats all clamor for a better way – a way to eliminate poverty or, at least, a way to redistribute a little of the wealth. We on the Left endlessly rage against the “greedy” forces on the Right over this issue. It is our raison d’etre. We wallow in our social consciousness. But the fight never ends, does it? Nothing ever changes because the modern political Left in America does not present an alternative to Capitalism. Most of us are contented Capitalists ourselves – and as proud of our material possessions, and of the “success” they convey, as any Republican businessman. The only real difference between us is that we on the Left assuage our guilt by calling for social justice and advocating for the poor, while those on the Right (if they feel any guilt at all) assuage it by going to church. In the end, nothing is accomplished but a lowering of our personal level of shame.

It is hugely ironic that, in these times of national crisis and natural catastrophe, this most Capitalistic of nations turns to Socialism to solve its problems. We all will eagerly give our money and resources to the victims of Katrina. We want and expect the government to take care of these people, and fix their problems, with our tax dollars. This is Socialism at its core. We resort to it because we all are mostly, in essence (and when not directly threatened ourselves), kindhearted, loving, and altruistic people. By nature, we care. When we see others suffering and in need, we respond instinctively by offering our help, our food, and by opening our homes. All of us want to alleviate human misery, but until a major tragedy like Katrina strikes, we seem to remain oblivious to the suffering around us. We may not do this consciously or purposefully, but we do it way too easily and too often.

We avert our eyes from the discomforting truth because to look at the world as it really is -- as we Americans have made it -- would cause us too much guilt and despair. We look away because we want to keep our focus on climbing higher up the pyramid. In order for us to have any self-respect, in order for our lives to have any meaning, we believe that we must continuously “earn, spend, and succeed”. We have all become so worried about getting more and more “stuff”, and so worried about appearing more and more successful, that we can’t see that most of the world’s people are worried about their very survival. We see nothing of their misery until a calamitous event wakes us from our stupor. Until a disaster happens, we are brain-dead and numb-hearted shopaholics.

In America we teach our children to share. We teach about cutting a pie so that everyone receives an equal portion. We have all learned this, we all know in our hearts that sharing equally is the right thing to do, and we know it is not right to take more than our fair share. If we are honest, during this time of American crisis, we will admit that there are millions of our citizens and billions of non-Americans who will never live to receive half of their share. If we are honest we will admit that after the shock of Hurricane Katrina wears off, and after New Orleans is rebuilt, most of us will happily go back to stepping over the poor people again, just to get more and more and more for ourselves. Does that picture seem familiar?

Despite our innate altruism, we reveal our enculturated greediness, as well as our hypocrisy, when we become indignant over people looting non-essential items in New Orleans. If we are politically correct, we may blame these actions on a few “bad apples”, or on poverty, or crime, or drugs, or poor parenting. We can blame the cops or President Bush. We can even blame the victims (which will be easiest to do). For the next few months and years, we will righteously wonder who or what was to blame for this immoral human behavior and the breakdown in civil order. But one thing is for certain; we will never blame Capitalism.

The people who stole the TVs when they had no electricity, stole clothes when they had no homes, stole alcohol when they had no water – happen to have been people at the bottom of the economic pyramid -- which describes the majority of New Orleanians, as well as the majority of people on earth. But under the dire circumstances that existed in New Orleans, or anywhere in the world when catastrophe strikes, stealing necessities for survival seems to us to be partly justifiable and forgivable. But we all believe that stealing non-essentials is wrong, don’t we? How could anyone be so selfish, we ask? Why would anyone loot? It seems to make no sense at all. But what I ask is this: Where is the sense or justification in the kind of looting that Americans do to the world everyday?

Does it make sense to gorge on food when millions of people face starvation everyday? Does it make sense to own two or three cars, a riding lawn mower, a 500 square foot garage to store them all, and a 3,000 square foot house for a family of four – when billions have to sleep on the ground? Does it make sense to drive gas powered motorboats on our pristine lakes, or to take 20 minute showers -- when millions of people must walk for miles everyday, just to get a drink of fresh water? Does it make sense to be as grotesquely opulent as we are in America, and hold ourselves up as an example for the rest of the world to follow? – especially for China and India?

Billions of people on this tiny blue dot of a planet face perennial political, religious, economic, nutritional, health, and natural crises. The planet itself is facing a multitude of current and future environmental catastrophes. Yet the people of the United States continue to loot it. Does this make sense? We are thieves with no cause and no honor. The only thing that separates us from the thugs looting New Orleans is that the non-essentials we steal, are actually necessities to everyone else.

Today we find ourselves needing and willing to sacrifice some of our non-essential comforts, so that we can aid our neighbors in the Gulf region. It will be a tremendous test of our collective compassion to rebuild New Orleans, and remake these people’s lives. But how will we do it? The city needs the underclass to return, both as a cheap labor force and for their contributions to the city’s culture. Will we spend billions of dollars to create free housing for the poor and destitute? Will we subsidize slum landlords so they can recreate filthy tenements for these people? How will we help thousands of people, who have never had anything, to go back to their original, pre-hurricane, substandard existence? How do we intentionally re-build an economically diverse city, with “rich” and “poor” sections? We would have to plan in advance, and use public funds, to create qualitatively different living conditions for the “haves” and the “have-nots”. But to do this will prove politically impossible, because it is blatantly unjust and immoral. Re-building in this way will still be attempted though – the Halliburtons of the world will smell a gold mine – but in the process, the intrinsic immorality of Capitalism will finally be exposed.

It has been said that, “Poverty is real but being Poor is a state of mind”. Whether this was ever true in the past or not, no human-contrived, purposeful poverty or deprivation can ever occur in the future. There can be no economic bottom anymore because the earth and its people can no longer sustain an economic top. The pyramid must be dismantled.