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The
Poverty of America:
The
disaster in New Orleans sheds new light on the nature of
poverty in the rich world, according to Jeremy Seabrook
The
human toll of Hurricane Katrina Is still being counted as
the fetid waters that drowned a city recede or evaporate in
the hot sun. Much has been written about how the 'war on
terror' diverted spending from the defences of New Orleans.
The absence of large numbers of the National Guard, on duty
in Iraq, further delayed help to the stricken. The lack of
clarity in responsibility between federal, state and local
authorities exacerbated the disaster. The somnolence of
George W Bush, deep, no doubt, in dreams of redistributing
yet more wealth from poor to rich on his long holiday in
Texas, made him slow to react to the enormity of what had
happened. It has also uncovered unexpected vulnerabilities
in this, the most powerful country on earth. It has laid
bare, in the starkest and most tangible form, what is well
known in theory: that this society is constructed upon a
celebration of inequality, ingrown violence and great
historic wrongs, which, for their sustenance, require
continuous human sacrifice.
People in India
often ask me whether poverty exists in the West. I tell them
it is widespread. They accept the truth of this, but look
puzzled. They find it hard to reconcile the ubiquitous
imagery of abundance and luxury from the West with what they
know of poverty as they experience it--the emaciation of
extreme want. Do people labour in the fields for less than a
day's wage? Do they suffer hunger? Must they work 16 hours a
day? Do they send their children to work? Must they wait
till evening for the money that enables them to eat?
No, it isn't
like that. Poverty in the West is, assuredly, a violent
visitation. But it has a different face from the poverty of
India. It is hard to describe, to those who have never been
out of India, the face of poverty in the richest societies
in the world.
The effects of
Hurricane Katrina have made it easier to explain, since it
has demonstrated to everyone the nature of exclusion and
resourcelessness in a country whose prodigious wealth
inspires both envy and desire in the peoples of the earth.
For the waters
that swept through New Orleans did more than inundate a
beautiful and historic city. Among the debris of buildings,
stores, churches, casinos, factories and fields, a human
wreckage was deposited on the desolate streets. Pictures of
used-up humanity--the shut-ins and the locked-aways, an
incarcerated populace, a concealed people, those who pay the
true cost of the expensive maintenance of the American
Dream--have been beamed into the gilded dwelling-places of
wealth.
A majority of
those unable to flee the city are the victims of success,
the failures and losers of a competitive, individualistic
society which chooses to dwell only on achievement,
celebrity and glory and to hide away its hopeless and the
disappointed in the cellars and attics of forgetting; from
which they were brutally flushed out by the raging waters of
the Gulf. Rarely had they been seen in such multitudes;
understandably, because concentrations of so many infirm and
vulnerable, elderly and weak, unhinged and disordered people
make visible the ugliness of America's terrible social
injustice.
They speak to
us of the nature of poverty in rich societies. Many
commentators observed that the poor of New Orleans were,
overwhelmingly, black. This is true of the urban area of New
Orleans--two-thirds black--which is one of the poorest in
the US. But this tells us more about continuing segregation
in America than it does about poverty. The disproportionate
death toll among black people demonstrates their
over-representation among the poor in the inner urban areas.
Of course,
no-one in the path of the violent storm that gathered such
intensity from the overheated waters of the Gulf could have
resisted its violence. But the spectacle of lives washed up
on hard city pavements was instructive of how far the poor
of America are, in the ordinary conduct of their daily
lives, without resources. If this seems a statement of the
obvious, it shows nevertheless the dissimilarity between
poverty in rich and poor countries. The stranded survivors
of New Orleans were devoid of basic skills for survival,
since survival in America depends totally upon money. Even
the poorest people of Bangladesh, Niger, Brazil or India are
not poor in the same way. The poor of the US have been
remade in the image of wealth; that is to say, their lives
have been fashioned by the same values, influences and
expectations as the rest of society, which are those of the
well-to-do. They are just as dependent upon money as the
rich are, only they do not have the wherewithal to
participate in a society constructed on the assumption that
all human needs, wants and comforts must be bought in from
the market. Nothing is grown, made, invented or created by
the people for themselves and for others. Wealth means
simply the ability to buy; to be cut off from this
fundamental activity is to excluded, exiled from the
society, an exile dramatically made worse when they were
unable to move out of the path of the swirling floodwater.
In the developing world, poor people have learned to cope
with what is lacking in their lives--not always
successfully, it is true, but they have not yet learned the
superior wisdom of the West, that nothing can be done
without money. This is why the urban poor in Dhaka, Mumbai,
Nairobi and Lagos still build their own shelters, create
their own livelihoods, seek out their own fuel and grow food
on any small parcel of land they can find.
But it
is at times of catastrophic suffering and loss that the
difference is most visible. That people in New Orleans left
bodies unattended in the putrid waters of the Gulf and
plundered the dispossessed is shocking and incomprehensible
to the poor of India, Bangladesh or Africa. For when
disaster strikes in the poor world--as it so regularly
does--people do not loot and steal. They do not fire guns at
rescue helicopters. They do not rob the hospitals of their
drugs. They do not barricade themselves inside their rough
shelters and write in white paint on their walls, Loot and
Be Shot. The instinctive response of the poor in the
'underdeveloped' world is to succour those weaker than
themselves, to share with them such meagre resources as they
possess, to show a fundamental solidarity: the dereliction
of others is not seen as an opportunity for gain. This is
why they feel a bewildered compassion for the destructive
rage of deprivation in the US.
Some
commentators in America described scenes in New Orleans as
'reminiscent of the Third World.' They could not have been
more wrong. This was an entirely 'First World' phenomenon:
gun battles between looters and the National Guard, who
operate a shoot-to-kill policy against predators, bloated
corpses abandoned on riverbanks and sidewalks, or simply
floating, unclaimed on the toxic flood--these are scenes
which occur only in the lands of privilege.
This
is what the poor of India and all the other hopeful
countries of the world have been taught to envy and to long
for. This is the supreme achievement of the richest
societies the world has ever known; and it is the model, not
merely preached, but actually imposed by the International
Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization
and the governments of the G8. That they are in no position
to tell anyone else what to do is the enduring lesson from
the disaster which has befallen, not merely Mississippi,
Louisiana and Alabama, but American society itself, as it
has demonstrated to the world its indifference towards those
for whom the designation 'loser', 'no-hoper', 'failure' is
applied as a stigma of moral, as well as material,
incapacity.
It has
long been clear that the West could easily provide a
comfortable sufficiency for all the people of its own
societies, if it chose to do so. It does not, for the simple
reason that the fate of the poor must be maintained, as a
warning and example to all who might otherwise be tempted to
drop out, to relax their vigilance, to withdraw from the
competitive ethos that drives people on to accumulate.
It is not ambition that drives the creation of wealth but
the coercive fear of this ghastly version of poverty, this
human-made construct that creates outcasts of plenty, human
scarecrows brandished at dissenters to urge them to conform
with this, the American or Western Dream. An indispensable
component of its promise of wealth and affluence is its
threat of a desperate, contrived and brutal form of poverty,
of which the poor of India remain, at least for the moment,
still innocent.
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