It’s
always a lively question when people, through their stupidity, get themselves
into trouble and depend on public agencies, funded by the public through
taxation, to bail them out. You know the sort of thing I am talking about: some
half-wit decides to ski on a mountain prone to avalanches; or he or she might
head off into the mighty Atlantic Ocean in a tiny, ill-equipped sailboat, and
after a couple of weeks signals to the outside world that he or she is on the
edge of a horrible death and needs immediate rescue at a cost of thousands of
dollars to the public purse.
These are the sort of questions that
can be asked after almost every calamity caused by natural disasters. For
example, a community has been built on a flood-plain. Every ten years or so,
the flood-plain is inundated, the community has to be evacuated, losses mount
into the milions of dollars, some peoole may even be killed, and then the
evacuated people whose homes have been destroyed go right back into the same
flood-plain and start to rebuild their community anew.
These are tough questions even to
write about: I find myself, for example, questioning the certainties expressed
in my first paragraph, to a certain extent. We wouldn’t want laws that limit
people from going to the depths of their aspirations, from undertaking
dangerous exploits, even if others might think them foolish. The best that
could be said in such circumstances is that they should go in with their eyes
open, knowing that if their disastrous experiences are repeated, they can
hardly expect to be bailed out repeatedly by the public purse.
Some people have raised such
reservations about the experience of Houston in face of its disastrous
floods. Houston is a city of six million
people or thereabouts, and it has no building regulations. It has never had any
zoning. This is because of the ideology of the people, their proud boast that
in Texas the individual can do what he wants, no one can stop him from building
whatever he wants wherever he wants. Why
not? Hey, you’re in Texas now, your own master in Texas. As a result Houston,
as someone told me this week, is built on a swamp, a swamp that has been covered
over by the city’s concrete, a swamp just waiting for the rainfall of the
century to fall and bite Houston on the backside, as it were.
This week some online magazine or
other had a cartoon in which some good old boy Texan, the sort that has always
objected to federal controls, is standing on the roof of his home yelling for
help from some federal agent ready to rescue him by helicopter. This seemed to suggest that the charitable
impulse to help people in distress might be considered to be constrained because of the idiocy of the past behaviour
of the guy in distress. Respondents by
the hundred, armed with moral certitude, denounced the magazine for such
disgracefully poor taste in suggesting that such criticism might be appropriate
in such dire circumstances. Yet, the question remains, how could a city of six
million people, armed with all the modern knowledge available to those who run
it, have been so stupid as to allow the city to just grow, like Topsy.
(Incidentally, who was Topsy? Thanks to Wikipedia I have discovered that the
expression stems from a slave character called Topsy in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s
novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, who, when
asked where she came from said, “I spect I growed. Don't think nobody never
made me.” The book became the biggest seller ever in the United States, and the
expression “grow’d like Topsy” quickly passed into general use, until now it is
used to suggest something that has grown large, but completely without
direction. So, it turns out, the expression is exactly apt for Houston.)
In searching recently for equivalents
to further illustrate my point, I have kept coming back to my story about
Bangladesh. I have written about this
many times, but it is worth repeating. In 1975, while covering an international
conference on Human Ecology in Auckland, New Zealand, I heard a speaker from
Bangladesh say that by the turn of the century, that is in 25 years, that small
country would have a population of 125,000,000 people --- about 25 million more
than at time of speaking. That struck me as extraordinary. Since I had been
born in the South Island of New Zealand, I wondered how it measured up in terms
of size to Bangladesh, and I discovered that the two areas were almost the
same, at around 58,000 square miles. At that time the South Island had 842,000
people, and I figured that to accommodate a population of 125 million, every hamlet
of 1,000 or more in the South Island would have to grow to more than a
million In other words, this was unimaginable.
(Of course, I am aware this is not an exact parallel: my intention is simply to
illustrate the drastic overcrowding of such places as Bangladesh.)
The payoff is that today Bangladesh
is estimated to have 160 million --- and at time of writing it appears that at
least half of the area of the country is under water, and uncounted millions have
been driven from their homes, with hundreds dead.
Now the imperatives of life for
people living in Bangladesh are perhaps the harshest in the world: lack of
arable land, overpopulation, lack of natural resources, and so on. But, the
question remains: how much sympathy does Bangladesh deserve when it has simply
kept on, possibly for religious reasons as well as those of poverty, increasing
population by continuing to have families with seven, eight and even more
children. Today it is scarcely
imaginable that this tiny country could have 160 million people, when, only 40
years ago it had 60 million fewer. And similar stories could be told of some
countries in Africa, Kenya for example. What is the responsibility of those
running these countries for these idiotic results?
I cannot really accept poverty as the
sole excuse for this. In 1978 I spent three months in China, making some
documentary films, and one film we made was about what was called in those days
a people’s commune, an area containing three villages of farmers on land that
in Canada we would have called marginal.
I earnestly probed for facts about the income in this commune, and my
conclusion was that in terms of income it was one of he poorest places I had
ever been in, comparable to the worst African slum, Latin American favela or
Indian village. And yet the commune, receiving
very few subsidies from outside, had managed to create a society in which
every child was in school, every adult had a job, every family a house, and in
which the health standards, kept under surveillance by a system of so-called
barefoot doctors, was not far short of our own. In addition, the commune grew
enough grain to be able to export much of it to neighbouring towns.
So poverty itself need not be a
determinant of action. More important is political will. And in Bangladesh,
with no other changes except a rigorous family planning programme, surely this
population explosion could not have happened.
On the question of whether they
deserve help, of course, surely they do, just as do the desperate people of
Houston, on humanitarian grounds. But wouldn’t it be a nice idea if that help
could be used in some way to persuade people, whether in Bangladesh, Houston or
anywhere else, to adopt a more
comunitarian attitude, such as the socialist idea that everyone is his
brother’s keeper?
Unfortunately, other ideas crowd in:
such as the incredible actions of the United States government (copied in
Canada under Stephen Harper, now fortunately abandoned), to refuse aid to any
organization anywhere in the world that advocates family planning. This is
barely comprehensible from the nation in the world which boasts the highest
income, the most sophisticated institutions of learning, and the most insistent
aspiration to export its attitudes and beliefs to other nations, and which in
doing so, claims leadership of the entire world. It beggars understanding,
this, as does the action of the US electorate in choosing a president so
manifestly unfit for the role, and so abysmally ignorant of the condition in
which people live in this world.
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