Everyone’s pain is within their personally focused intensity. No matter our capacity for empathy, a quality that seems to be sorely lacking these days particularly in the American body politic, when we suffer personal loss (breakup, death of someone close, job loss, accident, illness, etc.), it often impossible or at least very difficult to rise above our own pain to see how so many others have it worse. It’s often not much consolation. Easier to deal with fictional pain. Indeed, in times of severe challenges, we seek at least mental escape. Here, in the United States, our film (mostly migrated into streaming) and television production finds popularity in comedy (often dark), new worlds with people of mythical power battling evil, dark drama and horror… where the subjects face horribles that make us feel better. So do alcohol (sales are way up) and drugs.
And yes, millions of Americans are facing terrible economic upheaval, cloistered existence facing a mutating virus and fading hope about that comfortable future most of us had expected. For those at the top of the food chain, the pandemic provides a reason to shed employees, often replaced by artificially intelligent machines, without difficultly and even without the usual union resistance (although unions in the private sector represent less than 7% of the workforce). Such efficiencies and a new tax structure have pushed share prices through the roof. Luxury real estate is selling like hotcakes to the mega rich.
For those in the middle, with a little debt and some government support, life is interrupted but trundles on… somehow. For those at the lowest economic rungs, running out of food, facing evictions or finding a way to pay back rent, dealing with a particularly harsh winter and a disproportionate share of COVID-19 infections and death, life is really, really hard. Yet somehow, though it might not happen in the immediate future, at least they are on the list of inevitable inoculation with one of the approved and government provided vaccines. There is feeble but quivering hope that the government will figure it all out. At least maybe.
But for vast populations living in developing countries, particularly those with large, crowded cities where spreading disease accelerates, there are no vaccines on the horizon, demand for the few resources they extract, or products they grow or manufacture, has fallen. That thin and fragile dividing line between life and death seems to be withering away. So is hope.
For the developed world, with access to vaccines, it is understandable they have prioritized getting a vaccine to their own populations first. That this developing world is a fertile ground for storing and expanding the spread of the novel coronavirus until it can return as a global threat, that the virus is mutating in these fertile, vaccine-free fields in a way that threatens the developed world, seem to fall on deaf ears. “Me” first. Add ramped up starvation and the rising climate change decimation of subsistence agriculture to this litany of misery, and you get a truly sad view of so much of this planet.
Mike Cummings, writing for the February 5th issue of Yale News writes: “The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic caused a sharp decline in living standards and rising food insecurity in developing countries across the globe, according to a new study by an international team of economists… The study, published Feb. 5 in the journal Science Advances, provides the first in-depth view of the health crisis’s initial socioeconomic effects in low- and middle-income countries, using detailed micro data collected from tens of thousands of households across nine countries.
“The researchers conducted 16 nationally and sub-nationally representative phone surveys from April through July 2020 in Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, Colombia, Ghana, Kenya, Nepal, Philippines, Rwanda, and Sierra Leone. In all of these countries, respondents reported drops in employment, income, and access to markets and services, translating into high levels of food insecurity. Many households reported being unable to meet basic nutritional needs.
“‘COVID-19 and its economic shock present a stark threat to residents of low- and middle-income countries — where most of the world’s population resides — which lack the social safety nets that exist in rich countries,’ said Mushfiq Mobarak, [Yale] professor of economics and faculty director of the Yale Research Initiative on Innovation and Scale (Y-RISE), and the study’s corresponding author. ‘The evidence we’ve collected shows dire economic consequences, including rising food insecurity and falling income, which, if left unchecked, could thrust millions of vulnerable households into poverty.’
“Across the surveys, the percentage of respondents reporting losses in income ranged from 8% in Kenya to 86% in Colombia [the source of the above picture]. The median, or midpoint of the range, was a staggering 70%. The percentage reporting loss of employment ranged from 6% in Sierra Leone to 51% in Colombia, with a median of 29%.” These are numbers. Not the bloated bellies of starving children or the writhing agony of elders expiring without treatment options from COVID infections. They already had issues with access to clean and potable water, food, jobs and even the most basic medical care.
Climate change and Malthusian overpopulation are forcing nature’s hand. Zoonotic transmission of new potential pandemic level viruses should make us all aware that we live on an over-connected planet. Plague, pestilence, conflict and famine are nature’s tools to contain too many people. Those whose homes and livelihoods are decimated, likewise, tend to move into more productive lands… mass migration, by force if necessary. We better begin to realize that there is no isolationist policy, no border blockade or immigration mandate and no military build-up that will prevent cross border horrors… unless we accept that to solve these issues requires a unified and global solution. And since regions of extreme poverty are the greatest incubators of disruption, we really need to start there. If we don’t, it will blowback to us in a very big way.
I’m Peter Dekom, and the solution to our global issues requires a lifestyle adjustment, particularly in the richer consuming nations, an entirely new dedication to technological research and a total commitment to address poverty, wherever it exists, at its roots.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment