Last week, the big buzz (after Limbaugh) was the Invisible Children video to get indicted Uganda war criminal Joseph Kony prosecuted. The 30 min video has gone viral with more than 70 million views tonight (March 11). There are lots of criticisms of the video as an effective tool, but one thing's undeniable. This video raised a lot, a lot of money.
The sf point? Nicola Griffith in Slow River, 1995 (jeez, 1995) has her protagonist put together a video to raise money for a made up cause. In this book's future, young, wealthy people compete for who can send the most money the quickest to any online charity solicitation. They don't necessarily care about, or even know, what the charity's about; it's an intragroup competition.
I do think the people contributing to Invisible Children's Kony2012 care about the horrors in Uganda and are generally interested in doing something to help. But as I read about the video (and watched about half of it), I was reminded that there's an abstract quality to this giving. We're tossing money from over here, with the faith that it's going to do some good over there.
This seems to be my week for worrying about the complex and hard to solve problems of this world.
Sunday, March 11, 2012
Wednesday, March 07, 2012
nothing beneath you but air
One disadvantage to having a computer/internet/communications sort of job (which is pretty much like a lot of people) is that if there's a storm on the tubes, there's pretty much no way to avoid it. So with everyone else, I've been deluged by this Rush Limbaugh mess. I think it's interesting that as much bile and hate that Rush has spilled over the years, it was this particular bolus of hatefulness that's captured our fleeting attention and imagination. It's probably timing, what with the Komen debacle earlier this year, the Santorum ascendance (and the dubious pleasure of hearing his beyond retro attitudes about women and sexuality), and the tone-deaf (but highly dog-whistlely) "No Girls Allowed" panel in the House. I guess the only sort of surprise I've had is how stupid or disingenuous mainstream media has been about it. (I was not surprised that Bill Maher thought liberals should back off, since Rush faux-pologized.)
But this whole sad, predictable mess has been only a small distraction from something that's been bothering me for a few days. Last weekend I finished reading Katherine Boo's Beyond the Beautiful Forevers. It's about a group of slum dwellers living on some undeveloped land near the international airport in Mumbai. Reading it, you see what a fairy tale Slumdog Millionaire was.
Not that I've got anything against fairy tales, now.
But the reality of the lives that Boo writes about is that very few escape and that escape may mean capitulation to the corruption that permeates the institutions that the slum dwellers interact with. There's no good way out and usually there's no way out at all. It's hard to put my finger on what is staying uneasily with me ever since I finished the book. Partly it's knowing/suspecting that the only people who could do anything about these people's lives won't. (The impact of charity - precisely nothing - is made extremely clear).
Still the thing that nags, the thing that is about life here where I can do things, is how vulnerable these lives are. People die of jaundice. People die because cuts get infected from the sewage lakes they walk in. People die from desperation and eating rat poison. People die because they get hit by a car and people walk past them all day long until they finally die. People die because they get beaten to death, either by security cops or drug dealers. (Nobody knows and nobody but their friends care. The cops will call it something else on the death certificate and that will be that.) Now people die here in the USA all the time too. People die from preventable diseases and kill themselves out of of despair. Homeless people die unattended on the street and people get beat up by the cops. But people don't die here because they've gone to a hospital and the doctor will only give the medicine if they pay her (like right now) for it. They don't die because the medicine's no good at the hospital or because if they don't get taken care of by someone, usually a relative, there's absolutely no one else.
We are so safe.
It's not that horrible things don't happen, that there's no abuse of power, no poor people, no violent cops, but in the main? USians, even the poorest, expect some variety of justice, rely of some sort of medical help, even if that means the emergency room, and most don't worry that they'll starve to death, despite high levels of food insecurity among the poor. People expect to go to school. If they end up in court, they don't have to listen to a judge translate their complex testimony into monosyllables for the court stenographer. They can get a lawyer for free. There are institutions that often work, but maybe more important, we expect them to work. And we get pretty upset and make noise when they don't.
Maybe the thing that bothers me most about libertarians (or at least the ones I see roaming in packs on the internet) is that they want to take this away. They have fooled themselves into thinking that if we got rid of government, which would mean getting rid of these flawed, vital institutions, we'd be in the New Jerusalem. We wouldn't. We'd be in slums made out of decaying wood, glass, stone, and steel, rather than ones out of cardboard and crumbling hand-made bricks. There would be a few people living behind compound walls protected by those security guards, guards who will kick the poor to death and leave their bodies in the manicured lawns outside the walls for someone else to clean up. This is what makes me crazy about the politicians that pander to these poisonous fantasies. It's not just the lie, it's the vision of a feudal world with cell phones, where the rich are so very rich and everyone else struggles just to keep from falling.
Not that I've got anything against fairy tales, now.
But the reality of the lives that Boo writes about is that very few escape and that escape may mean capitulation to the corruption that permeates the institutions that the slum dwellers interact with. There's no good way out and usually there's no way out at all. It's hard to put my finger on what is staying uneasily with me ever since I finished the book. Partly it's knowing/suspecting that the only people who could do anything about these people's lives won't. (The impact of charity - precisely nothing - is made extremely clear).
Still the thing that nags, the thing that is about life here where I can do things, is how vulnerable these lives are. People die of jaundice. People die because cuts get infected from the sewage lakes they walk in. People die from desperation and eating rat poison. People die because they get hit by a car and people walk past them all day long until they finally die. People die because they get beaten to death, either by security cops or drug dealers. (Nobody knows and nobody but their friends care. The cops will call it something else on the death certificate and that will be that.) Now people die here in the USA all the time too. People die from preventable diseases and kill themselves out of of despair. Homeless people die unattended on the street and people get beat up by the cops. But people don't die here because they've gone to a hospital and the doctor will only give the medicine if they pay her (like right now) for it. They don't die because the medicine's no good at the hospital or because if they don't get taken care of by someone, usually a relative, there's absolutely no one else.
We are so safe.
It's not that horrible things don't happen, that there's no abuse of power, no poor people, no violent cops, but in the main? USians, even the poorest, expect some variety of justice, rely of some sort of medical help, even if that means the emergency room, and most don't worry that they'll starve to death, despite high levels of food insecurity among the poor. People expect to go to school. If they end up in court, they don't have to listen to a judge translate their complex testimony into monosyllables for the court stenographer. They can get a lawyer for free. There are institutions that often work, but maybe more important, we expect them to work. And we get pretty upset and make noise when they don't.
Maybe the thing that bothers me most about libertarians (or at least the ones I see roaming in packs on the internet) is that they want to take this away. They have fooled themselves into thinking that if we got rid of government, which would mean getting rid of these flawed, vital institutions, we'd be in the New Jerusalem. We wouldn't. We'd be in slums made out of decaying wood, glass, stone, and steel, rather than ones out of cardboard and crumbling hand-made bricks. There would be a few people living behind compound walls protected by those security guards, guards who will kick the poor to death and leave their bodies in the manicured lawns outside the walls for someone else to clean up. This is what makes me crazy about the politicians that pander to these poisonous fantasies. It's not just the lie, it's the vision of a feudal world with cell phones, where the rich are so very rich and everyone else struggles just to keep from falling.
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