Wednesday, September 27, 2006
Just another death
What a busy week it's been already! a CIA report blaming the Iraq war for the upswing in terrorism since 9/11 is "leaked," throwing the Bush team on the defensive; Maureen Dowd skewering Hillary for being too calculating as the 2008 presidential elections come into the political crosshairs; John Tierney lambasting Donna Shalala and her all-woman panel of experts for concluding that yes Virginia, there really are still barriers to women entering career paths in math and science.
But what's really caught my attention this week are two stories which at first sight do not seem to have much in common: Nicholas Kristof's two-part series on maternal mortality in Africa, and the revolutionary Spanish ban on stick-thin fashion models, discussed at length in Judith Warner's blog "Domestic Disturbances."
Kristof's description of a 24-year-old Cameroonian mother of three dying unnecessarily in childbirth, for want of a $100 worth of surgical supplies to support a Caesarian section, is harrowing and heart-breaking, especially after he drives home the point that 500,000 young mothers die like this in childbirth every year. "An African woman now has one chance in 20 of dying in pregnancy," Kristof reports. "In much of the world, the most dangerous thing a woman can do is to become pregnant."
Meanwhile, in the fashion capitals of the West, young women face quite a different threat: self-inflicted starvation. Bravo to the regional government of Madrid, which recently legislated that fashion models participating in that city's annual fashion shows must have a body-mass index of 18--much higher than the average model's B.M.I. of 15. Normal B.M.I. for women is around 20.
If for women in developing countries getting pregnant is the most dangerous thing they can do, for women in developed countries, it's opening a magazine or turning on the TV. How many young girls are starving themselves today to try to meet the "ideals" they absorb from the media?
Some 8 million American women suffer from anorexia nervosa, the self-starvation mental disease. Another several million are categorized as bulimics, who alternate between binging and starving. And there must be many many more borderline cases who don't make the official statistics, but who are at risk nevertheless.
Did you know that:
This is pretty frightening! But what's really jarring is the disparity between what's happening to women in the developed world vs. the developing world. In rich countries, women starve themselves to increase their sex appeal, and end up dying as a result. In poor countries, women don't worry so much about their sex appeal, but they end up dying for it anyway: sex=pregnancy=death. That, is, if AIDS doesn't get them first.
As Kristoff concludes, if men were suffering and dying at this rate over their sex appeal, the world would pay more attention.
But what's really caught my attention this week are two stories which at first sight do not seem to have much in common: Nicholas Kristof's two-part series on maternal mortality in Africa, and the revolutionary Spanish ban on stick-thin fashion models, discussed at length in Judith Warner's blog "Domestic Disturbances."
Kristof's description of a 24-year-old Cameroonian mother of three dying unnecessarily in childbirth, for want of a $100 worth of surgical supplies to support a Caesarian section, is harrowing and heart-breaking, especially after he drives home the point that 500,000 young mothers die like this in childbirth every year. "An African woman now has one chance in 20 of dying in pregnancy," Kristof reports. "In much of the world, the most dangerous thing a woman can do is to become pregnant."
Meanwhile, in the fashion capitals of the West, young women face quite a different threat: self-inflicted starvation. Bravo to the regional government of Madrid, which recently legislated that fashion models participating in that city's annual fashion shows must have a body-mass index of 18--much higher than the average model's B.M.I. of 15. Normal B.M.I. for women is around 20.
If for women in developing countries getting pregnant is the most dangerous thing they can do, for women in developed countries, it's opening a magazine or turning on the TV. How many young girls are starving themselves today to try to meet the "ideals" they absorb from the media?
Some 8 million American women suffer from anorexia nervosa, the self-starvation mental disease. Another several million are categorized as bulimics, who alternate between binging and starving. And there must be many many more borderline cases who don't make the official statistics, but who are at risk nevertheless.
Did you know that:
- Eating disorders have the highest mortality rate of any mental illness
- A study by the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders reported that 5 – 10% of anorexics die within 10 years after contracting the disease; 18-20% of anorexics will be dead after 20 years and only 30 – 40% ever fully recover
- The mortality rate associated with anorexia nervosa is 12 times higher than the death rate of ALL causes of death for females 15 – 24 years old.
This is pretty frightening! But what's really jarring is the disparity between what's happening to women in the developed world vs. the developing world. In rich countries, women starve themselves to increase their sex appeal, and end up dying as a result. In poor countries, women don't worry so much about their sex appeal, but they end up dying for it anyway: sex=pregnancy=death. That, is, if AIDS doesn't get them first.
As Kristoff concludes, if men were suffering and dying at this rate over their sex appeal, the world would pay more attention.
Thursday, September 21, 2006
A Mighty Mouse for Our Times
Oh, the audacity of President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela! He is fast becoming a modern-day David, or, more colorfully, a Mighty Mouse of Latin America, rivaling and even surpassing his friend Fidel Castro in shaking his fist at the huge Goliath of our time, the US of A.
The difference between Castro and Chavez can be summed up in one short word: OIL. Sitting on top of one of the largest oil reserves in the Western Hemisphere, Hugo Chavez can literally afford to be cocky.
But what cheek, what gorgeous and appropriate rhetoric, to stand up at the United Nations and call George W. Bush the Devil himself!
The difference between Castro and Chavez can be summed up in one short word: OIL. Sitting on top of one of the largest oil reserves in the Western Hemisphere, Hugo Chavez can literally afford to be cocky.
But what cheek, what gorgeous and appropriate rhetoric, to stand up at the United Nations and call George W. Bush the Devil himself!
The New York Times reported: "Speaking on Wednesday from the same lectern Mr. Bush had occupied the day before, President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela announced, to gasps and even giggles: “The devil came here yesterday, right here.
“It smells of sulfur still today, this table that I am now standing in front of,” he said."
Can it be denied that Mr. Bush has led the U.S. with fire and brimstone, and the victims of American aggression abroad probably do feel themselves in hell? (On American military might, by the way, see David Unger's excellent Times Talking Points piece on the way billions of dollars of the Pentagon's budget are going to support obsolete, Cold-War era weaponry, money that could be much better used for education, welfare, and genuine efforts at Homeland Security (a phrase I detest)).
It didn't surprise me to hear that Chavez was making waves at the United Nations. What did surprise me, however, was the reaction of the audience. Times reporter Helene Cooper plays up the "gasps and giggles" in her article, burying down towards the end of the piece the fact that Chavez's performance was met by"loud applause that lasted so long that the organization’s officials had to tell the cheering group to cut it out."
He drove his ethical position home, Cooper reports, by pledging to "double the amount of heating oil Venezuela donates to poor communities in the United States. He reminded reporters that Citgo, which is owned by Petróleos de Venezuela S.A., delivered free and discounted oil to Indian tribal reservations and low-income neighborhoods in the United States, including the Bronx.
"“We are ready to double our oil donations,” Mr. Chávez said. “That is a Christian gesture.”"
Go Chavez!
I just want to take a minute to express my annoyance with Ms. Cooper for faithfully reporting that Chavez made the faux pas, in front of reporters, of saying that Noam Chomsky was already dead:
"He brandished a copy of Noam Chomsky’s “Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance” and recommended it to members of the General Assembly to read. Later, he told a news conference that one of his greatest regrets was not getting to meet Mr. Chomsky before he died. (Mr. Chomsky, 77, is still alive.)"
How about cheering a world leader who actually reads and appreciates Noam Chomsky!
How many many many many faux pas has the press let our fearless leader GW Bush get away with? And what, pray tell, is his bedtime reading?
My advice to readers? Buy Citgo!
POSTSCRIPT, Sunday 9/24: Al-Jazeera reports that since Chavez told Americans they should read Chomsky's book, "Hegemony or Survival" has jumped to first place in sales, from its previous position at #26,000! How's that for a marketing ploy!
Saturday, September 16, 2006
True Democracy Starts Here
I'm happy to be able to report that there are many ordinary Americans who are working hard to celebrate next week's International Day of Peace meaningfully. But you'd never know it from following the mainstream media.
It's nothing new to say, but it nevertheless bears repeating: we define ourselves by the image reflected back to us by Big Media, and sadly, most of us never actually appear in that image. TV sends us images of celebrity culture, with its attendant stress on money, power, possessions and glamorous beauty (defined, for women, as tall, thin and sexy). In the print media, you have to be a total stand-out, to have achieved recognition on one of the mainstages of life, to be allowed access as an individual to the hallowed pages of the national press.
But the Worldwide Web really is changing the picture. By removing the media gatekeepers, who almost always, these days, represent the interests of the rich and powerful, the Web has allowed a million flowers to bloom, in the form of blogs, listservs, email lists, websites, you name it. We still don't quite allow ourselves to acknowledge the power of this incredible grassroots movement--we have been too well indoctrinated by the mainstream media to believe that if it doesn't show up in The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal, it isn't really something worth getting excited about.
It's true that these giant media outlets have a global distribution reach that dwarfs any single alternative press outlet. But the sheer diversity and tenacity of the millions of bloggers and web activists is beginning to shine through. I am beginning to believe that there will come a time when a substantial portion of the world will insist on telling its own story, its own way; on setting its own priorities, developed locally and at the same time in concert with thousands or millions of other local organizations throughout the world.
For this to happen, the sham of "democracy" will have to be exposed for the hollow trick of mirrors and light that it has become. Today's "masters of the universe" think they can get away with treating voters as though they're stupid sheep who can't recognize fraud even when their noses are rubbed in it. They think we won't notice that what is really going on in almost all national elections, worldwide, is a form of musical chairs among the rich and powerful and those who serve them.
By assuming control over the media giants, and hijacking the public education system, the Bush-era elites have come perilously close to accomplishing their goal of turning Americans into a country of obedient sheep. But not quite. Individual lackeys have begun to turn against their own leadership: witness Colin Powell's remarkable letter this week to the Senate Armed Forces Committee, arguing against the Bush plan to gut the Geneva Conventions.
And there's more. It was not from The New York Times, but through email that I heard that September 19, 20 and 21 have been designated "National Bush Crimes Days," when citizens all over the country will organize to speak out against the Bush administration's war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Last week, as I again heard through email, a group of concerned citizens tried to deliver an antiwar message to Bush at the White House, but were rebuffed and ignored. Here's how one activist who was there described the scene:
Here in quiet Berkshire County, citizens are stirring. A fabulous celebration of the International Day of Peace, September 21, will occur in Pittsfield next week. Our own citizen-run radio and cable TV stations are thriving.
Even in the schools, which have become carefully controlled in these days of "No Child Left Behind," I was pleased to see that my son's social studies teacher, in the Great Barrington public high school, chose to start the year by having his ninth graders read 1984, George Orwell's grim testament to the resilience of the human spirit, despite the best efforts of fascism to quench resistance. He supplemented the reading with a documentary film on Stalin, just to drive home the point that Orwell's vision is not mere fiction. Any alert student, looking out into the world today, will be able to grasp the parallels between 1984 and 2006.
It's up to us to keep alive the old, true meanings of words like "freedom" and "democracy." It's up to us older folk to show the new generations coming up that we still believe in activism, in using our bodies and our minds to create an alternative to the nightmare world conjured up by the likes of Bush, Cheney and their henchmen.
Another world IS possible. And you know what? I do hear it breathing now. Loud and clear.
It's nothing new to say, but it nevertheless bears repeating: we define ourselves by the image reflected back to us by Big Media, and sadly, most of us never actually appear in that image. TV sends us images of celebrity culture, with its attendant stress on money, power, possessions and glamorous beauty (defined, for women, as tall, thin and sexy). In the print media, you have to be a total stand-out, to have achieved recognition on one of the mainstages of life, to be allowed access as an individual to the hallowed pages of the national press.
But the Worldwide Web really is changing the picture. By removing the media gatekeepers, who almost always, these days, represent the interests of the rich and powerful, the Web has allowed a million flowers to bloom, in the form of blogs, listservs, email lists, websites, you name it. We still don't quite allow ourselves to acknowledge the power of this incredible grassroots movement--we have been too well indoctrinated by the mainstream media to believe that if it doesn't show up in The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal, it isn't really something worth getting excited about.
It's true that these giant media outlets have a global distribution reach that dwarfs any single alternative press outlet. But the sheer diversity and tenacity of the millions of bloggers and web activists is beginning to shine through. I am beginning to believe that there will come a time when a substantial portion of the world will insist on telling its own story, its own way; on setting its own priorities, developed locally and at the same time in concert with thousands or millions of other local organizations throughout the world.
For this to happen, the sham of "democracy" will have to be exposed for the hollow trick of mirrors and light that it has become. Today's "masters of the universe" think they can get away with treating voters as though they're stupid sheep who can't recognize fraud even when their noses are rubbed in it. They think we won't notice that what is really going on in almost all national elections, worldwide, is a form of musical chairs among the rich and powerful and those who serve them.
By assuming control over the media giants, and hijacking the public education system, the Bush-era elites have come perilously close to accomplishing their goal of turning Americans into a country of obedient sheep. But not quite. Individual lackeys have begun to turn against their own leadership: witness Colin Powell's remarkable letter this week to the Senate Armed Forces Committee, arguing against the Bush plan to gut the Geneva Conventions.
And there's more. It was not from The New York Times, but through email that I heard that September 19, 20 and 21 have been designated "National Bush Crimes Days," when citizens all over the country will organize to speak out against the Bush administration's war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Last week, as I again heard through email, a group of concerned citizens tried to deliver an antiwar message to Bush at the White House, but were rebuffed and ignored. Here's how one activist who was there described the scene:"At the gate of the White House a remarkable scene played out. The 50-page indictment and verdict was offered to those on the other side of the gate. But the document was refused and we were told that we must send it to the White House by mail." How can you refuse us? asked Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst. We are American citizens and you work for us. It is our constitutional right to present our wishes, demands and judgments to the President who represents us. Ultimately he had to reach through the gate and drop the document on the ground while security personnel, yelping dog on a short leash, and various “inside” press recorded the event with suspicious eyes, video cameras, and cell phones."
Well, there are other ways of delivering messages to the White House!Here in quiet Berkshire County, citizens are stirring. A fabulous celebration of the International Day of Peace, September 21, will occur in Pittsfield next week. Our own citizen-run radio and cable TV stations are thriving.
Even in the schools, which have become carefully controlled in these days of "No Child Left Behind," I was pleased to see that my son's social studies teacher, in the Great Barrington public high school, chose to start the year by having his ninth graders read 1984, George Orwell's grim testament to the resilience of the human spirit, despite the best efforts of fascism to quench resistance. He supplemented the reading with a documentary film on Stalin, just to drive home the point that Orwell's vision is not mere fiction. Any alert student, looking out into the world today, will be able to grasp the parallels between 1984 and 2006.
It's up to us to keep alive the old, true meanings of words like "freedom" and "democracy." It's up to us older folk to show the new generations coming up that we still believe in activism, in using our bodies and our minds to create an alternative to the nightmare world conjured up by the likes of Bush, Cheney and their henchmen.
Another world IS possible. And you know what? I do hear it breathing now. Loud and clear.
Tuesday, September 12, 2006
Politics As Usual
All this solemn posturing over the fifth anniversary of 9-11 is just sickening! Even the New York Times succumbed, leading off on 9-11 itself with a sappy article about W. and Laura placing a wreath on the World Trade Center site.
Yes, yes, we are sorry about the nearly 3,000 people who died in that terrorist strike. But what about the nearly 3,000 people who have died since then in Iraq--and that's just the Americans in Iraq, that doesn't count the Americans in Afghanistan, and the thousands of people of other nationalities who have died in the violence spawned by the Bush Administration's stupid, ill-conceived response to 9-11.
Meanwhile, here's a story that's barely receiving any press at all. In Mexico, the Presidential elections were decided by Supreme Court vote--oh-so-much like what happened in this country in 2000, with Gore vs. Bush. And guess who won? Felipe Calderon, the conservative candidate, backed by the U.S. against the leftist challenger, the mayor of Mexico, Manuel Andres Lopez Obrador. Did someone say those ballot boxes were tampered with? Hell yes they were! But what with all the hoopla over the fifth anniversary of 9-11, this sabotaging of justice just went unremarked int the mainstream press. The Times practically fawned all over Calderon.
And while the champagne flowed in Las Lomas de Chapultepec, the followers of Lopez Obrador cried with fury and grief.
Once again democracy is flouted in Mexico! But if we can't trust in the democratic process in the United States, how should we trust it anywhere else in the world?
Ordinary people (what the odious commentator David Brooks calls "human capital") desire a world in which life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness FOR ALL matter more than dividends and tax breaks for the wealthy elite. How many tears must be shed, how much blood must be lost, how many years do we have to wait for this simple and powerful vision to become reality?
Mexicans are not taking the outrageous appointment of a conservative President lightly. La Jornada, a big Mexico City daily newspaper, decried the appointment of Calderon as a move likely to further polarize the country.
And over in the beautiful little town of Oaxaca, which I remember fondly from my travels in Mexico, a group of teachers has been striking in the zocalo, or main square, all summer long, trying to oust the corrupt governor of the state of Oaxaca. This is the way change has always happened: people getting angry and frustrated enough with the usual channels (such as elections) to put their bodies on the line to demand change.
What will it take to get the ordinary citizens of the US out of their chairs, away from their computers and TV screens, and into the streets?
Yes, yes, we are sorry about the nearly 3,000 people who died in that terrorist strike. But what about the nearly 3,000 people who have died since then in Iraq--and that's just the Americans in Iraq, that doesn't count the Americans in Afghanistan, and the thousands of people of other nationalities who have died in the violence spawned by the Bush Administration's stupid, ill-conceived response to 9-11.
Meanwhile, here's a story that's barely receiving any press at all. In Mexico, the Presidential elections were decided by Supreme Court vote--oh-so-much like what happened in this country in 2000, with Gore vs. Bush. And guess who won? Felipe Calderon, the conservative candidate, backed by the U.S. against the leftist challenger, the mayor of Mexico, Manuel Andres Lopez Obrador. Did someone say those ballot boxes were tampered with? Hell yes they were! But what with all the hoopla over the fifth anniversary of 9-11, this sabotaging of justice just went unremarked int the mainstream press. The Times practically fawned all over Calderon.
And while the champagne flowed in Las Lomas de Chapultepec, the followers of Lopez Obrador cried with fury and grief.
Once again democracy is flouted in Mexico! But if we can't trust in the democratic process in the United States, how should we trust it anywhere else in the world?
Ordinary people (what the odious commentator David Brooks calls "human capital") desire a world in which life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness FOR ALL matter more than dividends and tax breaks for the wealthy elite. How many tears must be shed, how much blood must be lost, how many years do we have to wait for this simple and powerful vision to become reality?
Mexicans are not taking the outrageous appointment of a conservative President lightly. La Jornada, a big Mexico City daily newspaper, decried the appointment of Calderon as a move likely to further polarize the country.
And over in the beautiful little town of Oaxaca, which I remember fondly from my travels in Mexico, a group of teachers has been striking in the zocalo, or main square, all summer long, trying to oust the corrupt governor of the state of Oaxaca. This is the way change has always happened: people getting angry and frustrated enough with the usual channels (such as elections) to put their bodies on the line to demand change.
What will it take to get the ordinary citizens of the US out of their chairs, away from their computers and TV screens, and into the streets?
Saturday, September 09, 2006
Labor Day Resolution: Lose the Plastic!
My apologies to my loyal readers, I have been away from the Crossroads for two weeks while busily engaged in getting all my beginning-of-the-school-year balls in the air. Juggling does seem like an apt, if tired, metaphor for what I am doing, multi-tasking away at my two paid jobs and several more unpaid ones!
Instead of writing in this space last weekend, I was busy re-reading Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto, always the book with which we launch the semester in the Simon's Rock Sophomore Seminar class "Voices Against the Chorus." Every time I teach this course, I am gratified to be reading Marx just in time for the U.S. Labor Day celebration; and every time Labor Day rolls around, I feel more glum and irritated by the superficial show of support for working people that this holiday entails.
In Harriet Jacobs's autobiography, she talks bitterly about New Year's Day, which was one of the very rare occasions when the enslaved people of the South were allowed to take the day off, drink a little booze, and celebrate with each other. It wasn't really a happy time, however, Jacobs says, because January 2 was the day when many slaves would be sent to distant plantations to work for the next year, separated from families and friends and thrown on the mercy of unknown overseers. How can one celebrate with such an imminent trial ahead?
I feel that way about the current Labor Day celebrations, and indeed about each of the seasonal secular long weekends: Columbus Day, Thanksgiving, New Year's, Presidents' Day, Memorial Day, Independence Day (Christmas and Easter are somewhat different because they're religious holidays, though for many of us they feel like just one more three-day weekend). In each case we're being thrown a crumb of a holiday, which often just has the effect of making us work all the harder when we go back to the four-day work week that follows.
Now of course, as a teacher with summers and school vacations off, I am personally in a different situation, and I can't complain too much. But I do feel that we Americans are increasingly enslaved by our jobs, by our credit cards, by our mortgages and car loans and home equity loans. And in fact I'm always thinking these days about whether I could possibly manage to juggle a third paid job in addition to everything else I do, just in order to make ends meet.
It's really another form of debt bondage, isn't it? In many places in the developing world, debt bondage is a fact of life: in India it's common for people to borrow money to, say, build a house or marry off a daughter, in full awareness that they will become indentured workers as a result, possibly for the rest of their lives. It's also all too common for girls to be sold into prostitution, or boys into servitude, in order to pay off such debts.
Here in the US, things are more subtle. Children aren't sold to pay off debts here, at least as far as I know. But parents do routinely go deeply into debt in order to pay for their children's education, and to maintain the lifestyle they have been led to believe should be theirs. Sometimes the only way out of this debt bondage is bankruptcy, and indeed the bankruptcy laws have been tightened this year, as personal bankruptcies threatened to get out of hand.
Karl Marx described the capitalist system as "naked, shameless exploitation" of the poor by the rich, and he had the courage and vision to imagine that another way of life was possible. When students today encounter Marx, they tend at first to dismiss him as overly idealistic. It's human nature to be greedy, they say, it's our nature to exploit others aggressively for our own gain. So it has always been, and always will be.
But usually as we talk about it, this surety of theirs falters. Could it be that we have been indoctrinated to believe that might is right, that the rich deserve their wealth, that the poor are somehow deficient--that it's their own damn fault if they're poor? Could a socioeconomic model based on cooperation and compassion, rather than competition and greed, be possible?
Readers of Women's Crossroads know that I am a diehard believer, with Arundhati Roy, that "another world is possible. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing."
Communism in practice turned out to be repressive, rather than liberatory as Marx envisioned it. But his theories are still sound, and his description of capitalist exploitation rings as true today as it did in 1848 when the Communist Manifesto was penned. If anything, globalization has made things even more grim than they were in those days. Certainly the need for an international workers' movement is just as urgent today as it was then.
A recent op-ed piece in the New York Times asked plaintively, "Where have all the protesters gone?" And it's true--the days of colorful and powerful protests, a la Seattle, Genoa, and Montreal, seem to have passed. But some real gains have been made, and the continued vibrancy of the World Social Forum attests to the on-going efforts to imagine another, better world.
Another world is possible. But we may have to tear up our credit cards and detach ourselves from American consumer culture in order to manifest it. Now that's something worthing Laboring for.
Instead of writing in this space last weekend, I was busy re-reading Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto, always the book with which we launch the semester in the Simon's Rock Sophomore Seminar class "Voices Against the Chorus." Every time I teach this course, I am gratified to be reading Marx just in time for the U.S. Labor Day celebration; and every time Labor Day rolls around, I feel more glum and irritated by the superficial show of support for working people that this holiday entails.
In Harriet Jacobs's autobiography, she talks bitterly about New Year's Day, which was one of the very rare occasions when the enslaved people of the South were allowed to take the day off, drink a little booze, and celebrate with each other. It wasn't really a happy time, however, Jacobs says, because January 2 was the day when many slaves would be sent to distant plantations to work for the next year, separated from families and friends and thrown on the mercy of unknown overseers. How can one celebrate with such an imminent trial ahead?
I feel that way about the current Labor Day celebrations, and indeed about each of the seasonal secular long weekends: Columbus Day, Thanksgiving, New Year's, Presidents' Day, Memorial Day, Independence Day (Christmas and Easter are somewhat different because they're religious holidays, though for many of us they feel like just one more three-day weekend). In each case we're being thrown a crumb of a holiday, which often just has the effect of making us work all the harder when we go back to the four-day work week that follows.
Now of course, as a teacher with summers and school vacations off, I am personally in a different situation, and I can't complain too much. But I do feel that we Americans are increasingly enslaved by our jobs, by our credit cards, by our mortgages and car loans and home equity loans. And in fact I'm always thinking these days about whether I could possibly manage to juggle a third paid job in addition to everything else I do, just in order to make ends meet.
It's really another form of debt bondage, isn't it? In many places in the developing world, debt bondage is a fact of life: in India it's common for people to borrow money to, say, build a house or marry off a daughter, in full awareness that they will become indentured workers as a result, possibly for the rest of their lives. It's also all too common for girls to be sold into prostitution, or boys into servitude, in order to pay off such debts.
Here in the US, things are more subtle. Children aren't sold to pay off debts here, at least as far as I know. But parents do routinely go deeply into debt in order to pay for their children's education, and to maintain the lifestyle they have been led to believe should be theirs. Sometimes the only way out of this debt bondage is bankruptcy, and indeed the bankruptcy laws have been tightened this year, as personal bankruptcies threatened to get out of hand.
Karl Marx described the capitalist system as "naked, shameless exploitation" of the poor by the rich, and he had the courage and vision to imagine that another way of life was possible. When students today encounter Marx, they tend at first to dismiss him as overly idealistic. It's human nature to be greedy, they say, it's our nature to exploit others aggressively for our own gain. So it has always been, and always will be.
But usually as we talk about it, this surety of theirs falters. Could it be that we have been indoctrinated to believe that might is right, that the rich deserve their wealth, that the poor are somehow deficient--that it's their own damn fault if they're poor? Could a socioeconomic model based on cooperation and compassion, rather than competition and greed, be possible?
Readers of Women's Crossroads know that I am a diehard believer, with Arundhati Roy, that "another world is possible. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing."
Communism in practice turned out to be repressive, rather than liberatory as Marx envisioned it. But his theories are still sound, and his description of capitalist exploitation rings as true today as it did in 1848 when the Communist Manifesto was penned. If anything, globalization has made things even more grim than they were in those days. Certainly the need for an international workers' movement is just as urgent today as it was then.
A recent op-ed piece in the New York Times asked plaintively, "Where have all the protesters gone?" And it's true--the days of colorful and powerful protests, a la Seattle, Genoa, and Montreal, seem to have passed. But some real gains have been made, and the continued vibrancy of the World Social Forum attests to the on-going efforts to imagine another, better world.
Another world is possible. But we may have to tear up our credit cards and detach ourselves from American consumer culture in order to manifest it. Now that's something worthing Laboring for.
