Your Courageous Life

San Francisco sidewalk.

Like so many others, I heard the news about the earthquake in Haiti and carried it with a heavy heart. It is such, such unimaginable sadness, and of course living in California, where the threat of earthquakes is always in the background, there’s a lot of resonance with this issue.

But what I have been thinking about this week, is how this situation can be a call to action for myself, and how much I wish it would be a call to action for society as a whole to do more than just react to emergencies.

I was thinking this week about how it is that a person walking down the street with no health insurance who falls down and gets injured would be denied care by a hospital if it wasn’t life-threatening, but that same person with the same injury would be given care if that injury were related to an earthquake. I was thinking about how food and medical supplies are so badly needed by so many countries, and on a daily basis we as a society are allowing people in many countries to go without clean drinking water, but as soon as an earthquake hits, then we’re willing to start talking about problems relating to clean water infrastructure in Haiti.

Why do we, as a society, wait?

I was listening to a public radio broadcast in which someone being interviewed shared that–sadly–most Haitians are so used to having lack of access to good drinking water that they “already know” how to test for water, that they need to use water filtration systems, etc. So basically, lack of access to clean drinking water is already a struggle–a struggle that is so direly, horribly intensified by the earthquake.

So why do we, as a society, wait? We know these things are happening. We know that people are suffering. Where is the call to action–and I don’t mean this as a guilt thing for you, reading this, so much as I ask this question of our entire social system. When will it be worth it to us to invest in certain societal structures like education and clean water and telecommunications and transportation so that when disaster strikes, it’s not hitting people quite so hard?

And here’s why I think it’s so important to invest as a society–because since there’s a great infrastructure in the U.S. for clean water, power lines, natural gas, communications technology, port development, and transportation, I don’t worry about earthquakes in California.

Can we see the full luxury of that? I live in a state that is, without a doubt, going to experience a massive earthquake at some point within the next twenty years, and I’m not worried about it. Why not?

If an earthquake happens in California, I have a reasonable assurance that I will be able to find shelter and food and water. I have access to money that has allowed me to procure enough food and water to last myself and my partner for at least a week (plus emergency blankets and batteries and a flashlight and an inflatable mattress and sleeping bags…), and it’s stockpiled in our storage unit behind the house. I’m recalling that we spent approximately $150 on assorted non-perishables and canned goods–and I can’t even remember how much the other things like the battery-free flashlight and sleeping bags cost–and the average income of a Haitian per year is $270!

What luxury that, because of the solid infrastructure and the support of so many systems coming together, that I am able to spend almost as much as someone from Haiti makes in a year on food that I can just have sitting around “in case of emergency.”

What I’m asking myself in the wake of Haiti is how much more I can do to invest in permanent infrastructure and systems that work within a society. It is one thing to donate money during times of crisis–and that money is so needed, and I am so grateful that you have given anything, whether it is your dollars or your prayers. Yet I can’t stop asking myself where all of us can come together with a collective voice to say that it is not okay that people who are already living in poverty only get the help they need when hit with the direst of circumstances. Even from an economic standpoint, wouldn’t it make more sense to invest in a good system beforehand than try to clean up the mess? According to websites like water.org, a U.S. investment of 11 Billion per year in solid water infrastructures could reap 84 Billion in profit returns (and, might I add, do quite a lot to convince the world community that despite our reputation as a bully, we actually do care about collaboration).

We spend millions or billions of dollars per year on singers and songwriters who sing about love; love for each other, love for the world. We do the same with movies that have a theme of “love triumphs all” in the end. And what love are we, as a society, showing for society on a regular basis? The songs and happy endings are nice–and in the meantime, what’s our call to action? What if, for just one weekend, we didn’t spend all of that money on a movie and that money went, instead, to something else? Would it be okay with us, as a society, if “Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel” did not earn $178,451,165.00 at the box office, and that money went somewhere else?

I cannot say enough that this is not a post to chastise anyone else–this is what I’ve been thinking about these past few days. I’ve been asking myself how much more I can do, and how much more aware I can be. I don’t consider myself to be “outside” of this problem–after all, I do all kinds of things that are technically not the “best” for our society, such as buy my toothpaste from corporations like Target or drive a car that uses regular gasoline.

I don’t have answers right now, not for myself or for anyone else. Well, perhaps one–that it really no longer seems okay to me to go on waiting, whether that’s waiting for the “right” solution to appear or waiting for something else. No more waiting. No more hesitating. Time to act, try things out, see what works and what doesn’t, and above all else, to continue to affirm my gratitude for all of the luxury I do have as well as affirming that there are solutions available to us if we will simply work together and insist on a world where solutions, rather than crisis-management, is our priority.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 15th, 2010 at 11:41 am |