A girl squats on the
sidewalk,
Barefoot children work
by the traffic lights,
A man kneels down to a
puddle to wash his face,
Women examine each
other’s head searching for lice,
A man crosses the road
wearing nothing over his dirty skeletal body,
Young women and men
beg for food at the cry “we are hungry!”,
Generations live cramped together in a shanty house without electricity,
Having 12 items washed
at the local laundry costs as much as one coffee,
A woman in her mid 40s
dies overnight not knowing she had diabetes.
This is still part of
daily life in many Asian cities. So anachronistic, this kind of poverty is morally
unacceptable in the XXI century.
What has gone wrong in
the past 40 years?
What went wrong the last 40 years?
ReplyDeleteWith the fall of the barricades in Paris and Prague THE reform project of the 20th century, i.e. building a solidary society and developing an alternative to capitalism was trashed. Instead the archetype for societal performance became the entrepreneur. Before that, the social determinants of a person’s actual existence determined success or failure. The fight was to create a fair society. Today it is always the individual who takes responsibility for success or failure, it’s always YOUR fault if you fail to profit from the theoretical abundance of opportunities you’re presented with. Moreover, and here my thoughts resonate with Ziyuu San, the societal role or value of an individual became strictly correlated to its opportunity to capture income opportunities, to earn money and creating profit for those who rule our societies. If you can’t sell anything or produce any value you ARE nothing. Being a human being, basic human rights as such does not count much or rather anything in many parts of this world.
Being nothing in these societies implies you are excluded from their overall increasing wealth, health care, social security and living standards. You’re just trash, even lacking the dignity of the ‘noble savage’. Compare the Nambikwara tribe’s pictures Levi-Strauss published with in his ‘Tristes Tropiques’ http://digilander.libero.it/oinotnaelaropac/Nambikwara%20Sleep.jpg , who live (lived?) a very simple life, squatting in a corner of their clearance, washing in puddles, having sex behind the next bush. But this life did not contrast with the abundance of modern opportunities. It was/is just a very simple life in accordance with what the jungle has to offer.
Today we are offended by the appalling poverty oft he human trash left behind from societies, because they/we are valuing humans only on their ability to create income and profits. In Asia you easily and frequently see poor humans being reduced to their very functions of survival. However, if you watch carefully you’ll see severely damaged lives in also all our western cities, and in some economically disadvantaged cities this societal sediment accrues.
As appalling the poverty in the Asian countries is compared to the wealth their compatriots accrue, similar disgusting is the poverty of the white trash in our neighbourhoods compared to the very high living standards here. Despite our incredible societal wealth our neighbours may lead lives of imbeciles, tranquilised by the cheapest entertainment and sedated by cheap food and drinks.
Even those who appear to be the winners of the societal rat race http://www.gfilotto.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/The-Rat-Race.jpg appear today to be nothing but slaves. Remember, slaves were owned by their master fully, not only their work time but their physical existence as well. Is this pattern is re-emerging today? California’s so called high tech companies (what they sell is not high tech, but high con) now offer, and offering in a competition based system implies requesting, to deep freeze their female staff’s eggs, so that their productive work age can first be fully exploited for profit generation before being allowed to become mothers.
Another example: Google does from it’s German staff no longer require office presence. Not only that the costs of providing a workspace are herewith shifted to the employee, moreover the work/torture never stops. With an office job, after eight or some overtime hours you go home, it’s done, ideally you’re free. Not being at the office in the worst case implies you’re always disposable for work.
In both cases the modern slaveholders control over its property of profit generating human robots appears to be total.
Brave new world.
What went wrong: we were forced to give up the hope for freedom and social justice in exchange of becoming ‚happy’ consumers. Who can’t consume is and is worth nothing...
But then why aren't these people lifted out of poverty if not out of human & humanitarian reasons, "at least" to be turned into consumers?
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