For the past year or two, the American left and its cheerleaders on the MSNBC primetime block have beaten a steady drum for “health-care reform.” And yet, in the past month, a different news story has dominated headlines and chatter: the disaster in Haiti.
In hindsight, the scope of the Haitian disaster could have been reduced. Attention could have been called to the threat of earthquakes in the area and that so very many cement buildings would collapse and crush their occupants. Plans could have been formulated, debated, and put in motion. Potentially thousands of lives could have been saved had this course been taken.
Haitians’ vulnerability to earthquakes was, it goes without saying, not once discussed by Rachel Maddow in the months leading up to the deaths of 200,000 people. Keith Olbermann did not comment, specially or otherwise, on the failure of Congress or whoever else to act in the matter. Yet all along, as it turned out, a massive time-bomb was ticking away a few hundred miles from Miami. Americans were talking about the wrong issues and trying to solve the wrong problems, and we have paid a terrible price for those errors.
Some may argue that these were not in fact errors. We are Americans, it could be said, not Haitians, so it was not our problem. It could be claimed that we could never have seen this coming, or that even had we seen it coming, there was nothing to be done. But none of these arguments can be accepted without some sort of major concession on the part of liberal thinkers. For a liberal to say “I am not Haitian, thus I have no concern for this matter,” would be to admit of a grossly unbecoming nationalism. For a liberal to say, “We could not have seen this coming,” would be to hold that the American scientific apparatus suffers debilitating incapacities, unable to figure out where a quarter million lives might be at risk. For a liberal to say, “There was nothing we could have done,” would be to argue that government action can do little to improve matters abroad.
None of these concessions could be forthcoming: Liberals obviously are concerned for the well-being of Haitians, American scientists could have estimated (and some probably did estimate) the risk of an earthquake and the extent of devastation that would result, and liberals will not soon favor the writings of Bill Easterly to those of Jeffrey Sachs. And yet, liberal thought leaders spent 2009 obsessing not over the paralyzing poverty and terrifying earthquake risk faced by Haitians but instead over the details of a health-care bill that, in the best-case scenario, will mean slightly more medical treatment for some members of one of the most medicalized societies the world has ever seen.
Is the conclusion, then, that we have been talking about the wrong things? When we gathered around watercoolers last year to talk American health-care reform, should we have been pondering Haitian vulnerability to earthquakes? I think that a compassionate, cosmopolitan liberal would have to say yes, in hindsight, that is exactly what we should have been doing. But consider that, as I write today, the main thrust of liberal chatter is already refocused on health-care reform and the partisan composition of the United States Senate.
The MSNBC primetime writers have not performed a systematic post-disaster scan of the scientific landscape in a desperate humanitarian effort to find the next great vulnerability; instead, they have unapologetically reverted to their pre-disaster ways. Viewers are still, apparently, supposed to believe that American health-care reform is the greatest crusade of our time, with a Democratic supermajority being the vital means to that end. Somehow, Maddow’s sense of moral superiority survived the quake.
The Haitian disaster makes clear that the manifest agenda of the political left in the United States is not driven by thorough science or by altruistic compassion. The thought leaders and Democratic politicians are doing exactly what one would expect if their goals were to increase the material means and the social status of their consumer-constituents: the politicians propose policies that materially benefit those constituents, and the thought leaders shroud those policies in the holy cloth of morality. If and when these get their way, blue-collar Americans may enjoy a few extra medical procedures and left-leaning news consumers will get their righteousness fix, vulnerable populations around the globe be damned.
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2 comments:
Well I think there are other arguments. Since your post would seem to invite a response here, I'll say that even in retrospect, an investment in Haiti past a point would not be a good investment.
Sure we should devote resources to helping Haiti. As a cosmopolitan liberal, it makes sense to me that to the extent we want to maintain some involvement with other countries (and I think we do) we should perhaps refocus our efforts from blowing up people we don't like to helping people to like us. To this end, building schools, providing some sanitation and providing humanitarian relief seem like a great investment of time and money. Of course, I am not entirely opposed to blowing people up under the right circumstances. Being the radical liberal that I am I'm not opposed to people blowing us up under the right circumstances.
I don't think I can mount an argument past a point that we knew or should have known about the problems in Haiti. I could even take it a step further and assert that since we arguably helped cause the poverty, that we may have a responsibility to help.
I do, however, think that there are obstacles to helping. First, they may not have wanted help. Second, I think that Americans as a group would be opposed to putting something like helping Haiti ahead of domestic priorities.
It would be incredibly imperialistic to go into sovereign countries and solve their problems. And where there are cultural divides, our solutions don't always help. But even if Haiti wanted our help, I think our democratic system would have limited the amount we could have done.
I mean lefties have been upset about Darfur, female genital mutilation, apartheid, human trafficking, clean water, human rights, clean air, etc. etc. I haven't met too many liberals who think we are going to handle all these issues by throwing our money at them.
And though some liberals are more likely to be internationalists ratherer than nationalists, it doesn't mean that they don't still have tribal tendencies. So I think at some point, most people would acknowledge that some of our goodwill stops at our borders. We aren't exactly sending cops to Somalia afterall.
As for the health care debate, its hard to know what to think at this point. Sure some Americans have great health care and are overmedicated. Other sections of the population have high infant mortality rates. The fact that liberals may want to address people in this country first, I think confirms a tribalism we can acknowledge and isn't much of a surprise.
Here, the scientists are getting attention now:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/25/science/earth/25quake.html
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