I’ve been reading the WHO report on the social determinants of health recently. It’s a big document but written in crystal clear language and structured in a way which makes it easy to get the key messages.
THE key message is
Social injustice is killing people on a grand scale
And their positive response to that fact
The Commission calls for closing the health gap in a generation.
Quite a challenge!
The report is full of astonishing facts, but here are two connected ones which completely grabbed me –
40% of the population of the world exist on less than two dollars a day
OK, that’s enough to make you stop and think as you hand over the money for your daily latte!
Every cow in Europe is subsidised by European taxpayers to the tune of, yes you guessed it, TWO DOLLARS A DAY!
Now that makes you think about the choices we make! Doesn’t it?
Heroes Not Zombies 
Its an amazing thought… takes my breath away that concept. Pathetic!
Hello again Dr. Leckridge… It’s been a while since I last commented here, but I have kept up to date with your posts (all remarkable as always) and the beautiful and exotic perspectives in the pictures you share here. This particular post called out for my comment because, although the notion of world’s misery has always been boiling in the back of my mind, these past few years it stuck in my mind to the point that I can no longer understand what is it that makes us able to even sleep at night knowing of the circumstances under which the majority of mankind lives.
Like every Brazillian middle-class citizen, I’ve been skipping “bums” all my life. There they are, on the street, always looking down towards the ground in search of any scraps they can sell (soda cans, paper, etc), or sleeping in the sidewalk or (depending on where you’re walking at at what time) using cheap drugs such as marijuana or even glue with ink solvent. Not a day goes by without that scene repeating itself right before my eyes. Yet, when you grow up seeing this all the time, it sort of becomes natural to watch your step when you’re walking in the metropolitan area, so you don’t step on that guy sleeping in your way to the bus stop. Of course, you always understand that this situation is brutal, but it only affects you in a distanced manner. It’s sort of like when you think about your own death: if you ever had a near-death experience (as I did), you know how incredibly scary it is to know that you are going to die, but, when you survive it, death goes back to the end of your priorities. You get used to know that you will die someday, and it worries you a little bit, but that thought does not strike with such horror again until your life is threatened once more. It is that feeling, that little weak worry, that walks with you once you are aware that many people live and die in such degrading situations of famine and diseases that science has been able to cure for over a century. Of course, when that happens in mass proportions in your own country (as in my case), it affects you even more, usually contributing to harden your heart – given that the alternative would (and, really, should) be gruesome despair.
Mostly, people dare not to try and break that distance apart. They walk around dodging “bums” as one dodges a stray dog on the streets. The difference between the way those people live and the way we, “upstanding” citizens live is so huge that one cannot really put oneself in their shoes without a great amount of willed effort. But it wasn’t really by will that I first got that awareness. Let me share an experience here:
In the World Social Forum of 2003, which was held in my city, something pretty curious happened. I was 18 years old by then, and was sitting on the grass with some great people I had just met – a group of “hippies” (I think the term describes them roughly, but well enough for the present purpose), including a few Canadian people. A south-African reporter was interested in taking pictures on the local trenchtowns, but, since you have very little chances of getting out of a trenchtown alive with a camera unless you have someone trusted by the drug-dealers to vouch for you, he called for the help of my friend Marcus, who acted on NGOs inside some trenchtowns and thus was able to take him there. So Marcus and the reporter also joined us.
Suddenly, a homeless man, appearing interested in what was going on in such a meeting of odds speaking in these strange languages, came around us to hear and watch. Marcus invited him to sit with us, and so he did… in a few minutes, that generic homeless guy had a name and a voice that, for my surprise, was not begging for money or anything. As a matter of fact, he took a bit of marijuana out of his pocket and rolled it into a cigarette, then began to smoke it and tell us about his life. He was clearly mentally challenged, and I wondered how brutal it is that a man in such conditions was left to wander the streets in search for whatever he needed to survive. He even offered us to share with his cigar, which some of the “hippies” in the group accepted and, although I didn’t take the offer, I found myself in a pretty new position: a homeless guy was offering something to me!
And, please, let us not judge the act out of pretense politically correctness and say “damn, he offered you drugs!”. He was not a dealer, and never tried to charge anything from those who shared it with him. Marijuana is no tabu for him – and certainly not for most middle-class kids. I had already met homeless people and even talked to them. I had worked on charity before, so it was not particularly shocking that I shared a conversation with this guy, shook his hands and shared anecdotes (as I believe that the notion of spending an afternoon with a homeless person may sound shocking enough for the European or even to the regular alienated middle-class people in my own country), but what makes this experience particularly memorable to me is that, for the first time, I was put in a very different position in this relation with the miserable: I was being offered something! That mentally challenged man, who could not even buy a set of clothes or sleep on a bed, was offering me something that, for him, must have been extremely expensive! Then I considered that, with just the money I had on me in that very moment, he could probably feed himself for the whole week! And yet, I did not give him a single cent – I certainly would if he had asked, but the fact that he didn’t is part of what kept him apart from those other people I dodge everyday in my memory. The fact that I never offered anything except for the sandwich (which, by the way, I got for free) I had on my backpack is also part of the glue that made this experience stick with me. That guy, that day, was not a homeless guy, he was one of the friends I met there and, to be honest, one of the people I never saw again after the social forum was over.
After that, whenever someone posts on a blog that 40% of the people in the world live in misery, this is no long such a distanced number or such generic people. These are people just like me and you. They shiver in the winter cold and their body ache after a night sleeping on the ground. Seems to me that we shouldn’t have the right to sleep before we change such brutal, abysmal, horrific reality, and yet, here I am, going to sleep in my warm bed and soft pillow, and wondering how it is that I can actually do it knowing the things I know.
….
erm… well, that was quite a big comment… I hope you and your readers had the patient to check it out. It has become so long that, after reading it, I decided to post it on my own blog to, since I feel I have shared something that may interest my readers too (and because I’m too busy to write something else for the week… I was just supposed to write a short comment but, as usually happens, words took a life of their own in the middle). Maybe the muses are to blame 🙂
Thank you for the attention, and thanks for the amazing posts. Know that, although silent, I still take a lot of pleasure from coming to your blog on a weekly basis and am grateful for the thoughts and experiences you share with your readers here.
Nice to hear from you again ego84 – thank you for those most kind and encouraging comments – I’m pleased to know you’ve been checking by regularly and enjoying what you find.
I completely agree with what you’ve said here.
It’s a fundamental human issue. There’s no doubt that a personal encounter feels entirely different from information about a group of people.
You know I think there’s another element too. Although we clearly live in a much more connected world, I think most people feel pretty impotent to effect change outwith their own immediate environment. And that dis-empowerment numbs us somehow. The average person’s feeling of distance from the power sources of politics and globalised commerce is kind of stultifying.
Good point. I agree with you that most people would be willing to to be more proactive were they not convinced that social brutality is a natural attribute of the human reality, and that it is, thus, beyond their power to change it. Indeed, people feel impotent, distanced from the power sources. Isn’t it diabolically ironic that people can feel so hopelessly distanced from something that emanates from their very selves?
There is a popular story in Brazil, which I heard as being a fact from the colonial days (although it sounds to me more like a fable), when a scribe committed an slight punctuation mistake while registering the order of execution that was dictated by a judge. In English, we could say that the judge’s orders were: “Release him you shall not, execute him!”. But the document received at the prison read: “Release him, you shall not execute him!”. The story says the man was released and disappeared before the authorities could know the mistake. The moral of the story (if we can read it as an Esopo’s fable) is that even a mere comma can save a man’s life.
The point where I am trying to get to is that even by the mere discussion of such absurdities as those reported by the WHO (and it’s multiplication through the media, such as in your web-log) is already an invaluable exercise of power. A power that is not free or natural or any bit innocuous (see the Internet access restrictions in some dictatorial countries for example). In the 70’s and first half of the 80’s, I wouldn’t be able to tell you that some studies estimate that 2.500 kids die every year in Brazil due to lack of basic sanitation – and, of course, that restriction would have nothing to do with the nonexistence of blogs. Such studies could never be made and, even it were and I did manage to find a way to tell you about their results, I would probably end up dead after a week of torture for publicizing such “false” information under subversive intentions of betraying the country by demeaning it’s image internationally. “Just” the power to communicate, to share opinions, is absolutely precious!
The mere fact that some of your readers may heighten their awareness towards the world’s misery and, maybe, towards the fact that there’s always something that they can do about it (even if it is as simple as writing a comment on a blog) is already an amazing – and much needed – exercise of power. 🙂
Identifying the problem is surely a step in the right direction.
Understanding the problem is probably beyond us, although necessary before realistic solutions can be entertained.
Under these conditions it’s hard to hope for a solution short of revolution.