Anthony Lewis: The Inescapable World — “After Sept. 11 it was said by many that
our world had irrevocably changed. That
is true in a sense that we have not yet
grasped.
Winning the military struggle against Osama bin Laden and his Taliban
protectors, if and when we do, will not end the threat of terrorism against
the United States. That will require, in the long run, something more
difficult than military action: a profound effort by America and the West
to ease the poverty and misery of the developing world.” NY Times op-ed [“FMHreader”, “FMHreader”]
Maybe Anthony Lewis hasn’t grasped this yet, but not because it hasn’t been said. Every blog I read which comments on the aftermath of 9-11 has said, or linked to, variants of this revelation so many times already in just six weeks that it is mind-numbing in its familiarity and banality, so much so that I’ve pretty much stopped linking to expressions of this sort of sentiment. They’ve become truism, especially to progressives accustomed to thinking this way since… forever? Yet we know that the world at large, and the alarmingly clueless administration they half-voted into office, hasn’t grasped this notion. Pundits have been proclaiming, indeed, that we’ve already lost the real war ahead, essentially because we haven’t grasped this. I agree, the prospects are distressingly grim. The people with this perspective are, unfortunately it appears, largely talking only to one another, a community of already like-minded.
NPR this morning had a piece on the adverse effect 9-11 is having on charitable giving. As people divert their donations to the relief funds, more prosaic but no less urgent social causes feel the pinch. My family and I, reflexively, gave as deeply as we felt we could to 9-11-related efforts. The acceleration of the downturn in the domestic economy partly precipitated by the attacks may add to the downturn in giving. (In Massachusetts, we’ve already been told, for example, that the budgetary impact of 9-11 is going to force the state to put on the back burner any planned expansion of funding for placements for mentally ill children ‘stuck’ in mental hospitals, a problem with which I’ve been preoccupied professionally.)
Perhaps the message that has to get out, particularly to people moved compassionately to give for the first time in the face of the emergency, is that making the world a place where these things don’t happen requires us to not lose sight of other compassionate needs. I suggest that this is a time for anyone who donates to rethink their limits, to dig deeper, and start their own version of a matching fund. For every dollar, or every hour of time, we have given to help the direct aftermath of this disaster in NY or DC, perhaps we should truly consider giving an equivalent amount to each of these other categories of need, more urgently now rather than less:
- domestic efforts against poverty and social injustice which might otherwise get ignored just now, as NPR’s piece suggests
- the effort to assist the Afghani people, within their country and in refugee camps, ravaged by the current war effort
- efforts to address the impoverishment, the human rights crisis, and the public health emergency (including AIDS) in the developing world, as Lewis’ column and a myriad of other sources suggests.
I’m under no illusion that charitable giving (of time or money) is the solution. In scope, its impact is limited. More than that, it is not straightforward; giving has a complicated and sometimes paradoxical effect both on the giver and the recipient, in both a practical and a spiritual sense. Certainly, it’s worth reflecting on whether a given relief or social action agenda is actually slapping a ‘bandaid’ on problems that will perpetuate or worsen the underlying inequities of the world. But we can turn 9-11 into an opportunity to consider these issues and make a start at meaningful transformation of the world into a place where, if it is to be judged globally by how we treat our most unfortunate, it is worth living in.
