Ten days in and the news media has calmed down from the initial fear of an H1N1 (Swine flu) pandemic.  Confidence in promised vaccines and the money pumped into stockpiles of antiviral drugs has allowed the nation to breathe, but all too soon.  Although research on H1N1 is underway and people feel that the risk of large scale deaths is under control, this frightening event has failed to grab global attention in the way it is needed.  The causes of H1N1 are largely ignored and the silence of news sources speaks volumes about the actual awareness of the public to the underlying crisis.  People are not paying attention to Mexico’s economy, people’s availability to healthcare, healthy foods and lifestyles.  Again, it is vital to pay attention to the inequality of Mexico’s wealth, availability to clean water, efficient waste systems, and proper grazing areas.  The possibility of pandemic should have brought attention to the need for global health awareness and the realization that if and when pandemic strikes, the poorer nations will be the first to suffer.  Evaluation of H1N1 needs to bring about comprehension of structural violence in and between countries and cause nations to see each other through unveiled eyes.

            The network of factors within Mexico suggests that structural violence and neoliberal approaches have disfigured the way countries view each other.  Structural violence is an analytical framework which views problems within countries as a combination of causes and effects.  Robert Wallace in his article “The NAFTA Flu” claims that one of the main causes of this illness includes agribusinesses moving their companies to “take advantage of cheap labor and land.”  He goes on to say that the NAFTA agreement has only increased inequality between Mexican and U.S products.  NAFTA is a neoliberalistic tactic that has pushed people out of the way in order to clear room for business, power and money-making schemes.  The inequality created by this agreement has not been beneficial.  The subject of this article has been one of the few critiques and suggestions of causes concerning this disease.  With the outbreak of H1N1, these factors were swept under the rug of paranoia.  News sources such as CNN and BBC were invested more in the deaths of victims than the causes.  The fear was and currently is understandable; H1N1 is a strain of the virus that killed millions in the Spanish Flu of 1918.  Ages 20-40 died in greater numbers than the very young and old, thus the first deaths of H1N1 and relative ages were frightening (Taubenberger).  However it is necessary, especially as fear is becoming caution, to realize that poor and unequal will die first.  Access to healthcare for particularly rural nations is a determining factor in the spread of disease.  Understanding that structural violence and other possible causes and how they are intertwined with H1N1 is vital in conquering this disease.

             H1N1 is not simply a flu that needs a vaccine; it is a wake-up call for people to approach economic and social inequality as factors which, in the direst situations, have the ability to harm everyone.  Pundits like Michelle Malkin and Michael Savage have seen H1N1 as an opportunity to call for illegal immigration restrictions.  Their aim is not to further understanding but promote divisions.  WHO Director-General Margaret Chan on April 1 gave a speech which had the aim of asking for global solutions to economic crisis and its impact on health.  In another speech in Turkey April 27, she critiqued market fundamentalism and its effects on health and called for global interdependency in this crisis.  Chan’s speeches are excellent reminders and a needed contrast to misguided pundits opinions.  H1N1 is a warning and a call for every person to comprehend the real issues behind the paranoia.  If this is possible, then global health and interdependency is within reach.  It is all too easy to forget that Bird Flu, a much more deadly flu than H1N1, is still out there and no vaccine has been found.  Poverty-stricken nations will always be hit hardest and the sooner nations view economic vices as problematic, the better.  This is not the time to focus on political agenda that partitions nations away from each other but rather the common goal of vaccination.  Poverty and illness are only symptoms of economic and social inequalities and approaching these issues is the first step in solving them.

(Urg.  My citations,  forgive them, they are doing what I want them to…)

 

Chan, Margaret, Dr. “Impact of financial crisis on health: a truly global solution is needed.” 1 April 2009.

<http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/statements/2009/financial_crisis_20090401/en/index.html>

Holland, Joshua. “Michelle Malkin and Michael Savage Use Swine Flu Crisis to Peddle Their Xenophobia.”

29 April 2009.

<http://www.alternet.org/immigration/138859/michelle_malkin_and_michael_savage_use_swine_fl

u_crisis_to_peddle_their_xenophobia/?page=entire>

Malkin, Michelle. “Hey, maybe we’ll finally get serious about the borders.” 25 April 2009.

<http://michellemalkin.com/2009/04/25/hey-maybe-well-finally-get-serious-about-borders-now/>

Taubenberger JK, Morens DM. 1918 influenza: the mother of all pandemics. 2006 Jan. 6 May 2009

<http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/EID/vol12no01/05-0979.htm>

Wallace, Robert. “The NAFTA Flu.” 28 April 2009.

<http://farmingpathogens.wordpress.com/2009/02/28/the-nafta-flu/>

“U.S. swine flu cases grow to 91, including child who died.” 29 April 2009.

<http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/04/29/swine.flu/index.html>

“US reports first swine flu death.” 29 April 2009. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8024690.stm>

The transit doors pop open.  A pale man in his thirties walks out.  His face looks depressed but even more so, it looks weary and has the fatigue that could say, “I did not want to get out of bed this morning.”  Almost to the bus stop he hurls out a wad of spit and coughs deeply, twice.  His oversized dark brown fleece only serves to accentuate his drooping shoulders, fair skin and sandy colored hair.  I can hear his cough about seven people behind me.

Consumed with his apparent “sadness,” I stood wondering what the cause was.  Could it simply be his cough?  Did he have a rushed morning?  Did his wife forget to kiss him goodbye?  Is his sadness just a look that precedes one of his coughs?  Or am I projecting?  Do I want to see a deep sadness within him because I want to know there is someone with that connection to me?

He coughs again and I immediately wish he was not riding the bus.  I take note of my thoughts, how quickly they turn from sympathizing to criticizing him for coming into public.  How dare he cough on the bus!  Doesn’t he know that there is only so much space for air to circulate?  It’s not just paranoia about the Piggy Pox (Swine flu), I’ve caught bronchitis from riding the bus (well, it’s most likely that I did) and you don’t catch bronchitis simply from the air.  That crap has to transfer through some kind of contact. 

My imagination does me too much credit when it starts to think of the ways that germs spread on the bus.  Most of the times I refuse to think about it and I get along fine. 

Perhaps a contrasting element to my narrative, not long after the pale man, a man the same age, six feet tall (at least) and tan skin, strides out of the transit center doors with a large portfolio in hand.  Button up shirt, slacks and dress shoes, he walks with a purpose to the event center behind this pitiful line of people waiting for the bus, in the rain.

On the bus, my mind is assaulted with images of other people.  A girl, looking like a tiny doll, sits across from me in the same lime green coat I always see her in.  An older man mutters random bits about cars and his personal life to the guy sitting next to him (who has not intention of caring).  A younger man gets on at the next stop in a purple leather jacket and tries to maintain his balance (there aren’t enough seats).

I wonder where they’re going.  Did they pack a lunch like me?  Are they going to the University? Bellevue?  Do they work for Microsoft.  Oh, I hear a cough, I hope that man will be ok.  Why does every student have a North Face backpack?  She looks like a girl I used to know.  I wonder how old that man is.  Does he ever feel short?  That man looks like Richard Alpert (no joke, dark eyelashes and everything).  I’m glad this person doesn’t smell.  Gosh, it’s getting warm in here.

Then I begin to contemplate my day, my future, what time I’ll actually get to school.  There are so many people, so many thoughts, feelings and actions.  I was struck by this passage yesterday and I meant to post it anyway, but now after my morning, it seems even more fitting.

The story follows a little black girl who wishes for the blue eyes and finally receives them when she is raped by her father and goes insane.  I believe this passage speaks to me today, this morning.

 

                   “All of our waste which we dumped on her and which she absorbed.  And all of our beauty, which was hers first and which she gave to us.  All of us—all who knew her—felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her.  We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness.  Her simplicity decorated us, her guilt sanctified us, her pain made us glow with health, her awkwardness made us think we had a sense of humor.  Her inarticulateness made us believe we were eloquent.  Her poverty kept us generous.  Even her waking dreams we used—to silence our own nightmares.  And she let us, and thereby deserved our contempt.  We honed our egos on her, padded our characters with her frailty, and yawned in the fantasy of our strength.

            “And fantasy it was, for we were not strong, only aggressive; we were not free, merely licensed; we were not compassionate, we were polite; not good, but well behaved.  We courted death in order to call ourselves brave, and hid like thieves from life.  We substituted good grammar for intellect; we switched habits to simulate maturity; we rearranged lies and called it truth, seeing the new pattern of an old idea the Revelation and the Word.”

-Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

 

Just food for thought…

  

Sheikh Mohammad al-Maktoum has turned the coastal desert wasteland of Dubai into the world’s playground.  Architects, movie stars, and shop-a-holics all have the opportunity to make use of their money in some of the most extravagant buildings known to man.  Attractions include: the Hydropolis, the world’s first underwater hotel which lies approximately sixty-six feet below the sea, the world’s largest mall, the world’s largest theme park Dubailand is still in the making, and artificial islands available for sale, are shaped like the world and palm trees.  However underneath the glamour of al-Maktoum’s gigantic city lie the construction laborer workforce and their basic human rights. Who author Mike Davis labels as “an indentured, invisible majority,” the mainly Asiatic laborers building the “world’s largest,” find themselves working for $100 to $150 per month and living in crowded migrant housing outside Dubai (Davis, 64-66).  In 2004, Humans Rights Watch approximated 880 construction related deaths with a majority of the accidents “unreported by employers or covered up by the government” (Davis, 66).  In a country where trade unions, striking and all agitators are illegal, workers find themselves unable to complain about their situations without threat of deportation.  Thus many basic amenities such as running water and working toilets go unnoticed in the worker’s camps (Davis, 66-67).  This organization of labor, its inequalities, and the economic boom of Dubai, suggests that understanding the role and definition of structural violence within in the country is vital to solving its human rights issues.

 

Instead of labeling the insignificant attention paid to the South Asian laborers as a simple product of the poverty of countries like Sri Lanka, India, and Pakistan, it is important to view the ignored rights of these people as structural violence, an intense schema which studies the political, economic and societal histories of the people and region in question.  Paul Farmer, noted anthropologist and philanthropist, understood that the term “structural violence” is often placed into categories too complicated to understand.  He claims three flawed explanations of structural violence: exoticization of suffering (naturalizing and individualizing people’s conflicts simply attribute the fault of poverty or suffering to the person), the “sheer weight of suffering makes it difficult to render” and thirdly, the dynamics and distribution of suffering are still poorly understood (Farmer, 17).  Within the confines of Dubai, structural violence puts an emphasis on viewing the construction workers’ rights as a result of many factors.  Factors which include the education of the workers, their economic situation in coming to the UAE, their health status, as well as Dubai’s class structure, its past economies, past wars, and future goals.  Structural violence requires comprehension of the history of a country and its people, individual and collective narratives, political and social discussions.  Attribution of poverty is not blamed on the lower class in cultural relativist fashion but looked at as a summation of a society’s actions.  It is not a label but a careful analysis of various situations and their possible causes. 

 

Inequalities in Dubai, even among its own people, have resulted from centuries of inequality through wealth.  Slavery was only abolished in 1963 and freedom of speech and religion are still highly curtailed. The presence of the government in dealing with complaints from Pakistani workers claiming they were being cheated of their wages and Filipina maids for “adultery” (when they reported rape), resulted in deportation or threats (Davis, 65-66).  The government attempted to decrease the “inequality” in race among their construction laborers by hiring more Arab workers but foremen were hard pressed to find other workers willing to work for such low wages.  Farmer discusses the effects of racial classification on many groups and its ability to increase inequality and suffering (Farmer, 9).  Even in job choice, Arab men are more likely to turn down a lower paying job that a South Asian man will take.  The complexity of the working situation in Dubai reflects the broad topic of structural violence.  Farmer warns against falling into “reductionistic analyses” in the hope that people will see human rights and structural violence as collective factors.  Although structural violence is a frame for understanding the causes behind the actions of people groups and regions, it seeks to break the stereotypes of signaling out one important cause above all others.

 

In examining the transition from a sheikhdom to an economy supporting incredulous measures of free trade, the Neoliberalist aspects of Dubai are staggering.  Foreign investment is reaching new levels as countries continue to buy UAE oil but more importantly, buy into Dubai’s business sector.  Dubai already hosts a technology hub with Microsoft, Dell, and HP as some of its investors and allows zones of 100% free trade, where taxes and import/export duties are not allowed (Davis, 62).  Yet the stark differences between the laborers and Dubai’s wealthy are paid no attention.  Definitive correlations can be made between the economic rises.  Davis summarizes his points, “So much has been invested in Dubai’s image as an imperturbable paradise of capital, that even small disturbances can have exaggerated impacts on investors’ confidence” (Davis, 67).  The devastating aspect of that statement is that as investors seek to further their capital, they are more concerned with the outward appearance than the reality of the situation. 

 

The solution to acknowledging workers’ rights does not lie simply in the distribution of finance but in the comprehension of Dubai’s political and social history.  Understanding interactions between the people of the entire region and their social structures is vital to moving forward in human rights for the entire UAE.  The result of workers’ riots, if anything, has produced a measure of unrest among the thousands of laborers.  Although workers have attempted strikes and protests, the press is prohibited from writing about it (Davis, 65).  Through 2004 to 2005, striking began with a march of several thousand Asian workers, followed by several smaller demonstrations protesting unsafe working conditions (Davis, 66).  However, in 2006, when violent riots broke out, they were calmed by minor concessions and severe threats (Davis, 67).  In essence, to fix the issue of running water and accessible toilets may cause a cessation in the riots, but it will not provide any permanent solution.  Resolutions will only be found in understanding the depth of the factors in place in the structural violence of Dubai, by examining human and material context together.

 

  

 

Davis, Mike. “Sand, Fear, and Money in Dubai.” In Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism.

New York: The New Press (2007).

Farmer, Paul. “Chapter 1: On Suffering and Structural Violence, Social and Economic Rights in the

Global Era.” Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor.

18 Mar 2009 <http://www.uxpress.edu/books/pages/9875/9875.ch01.php>

Trying to create a valuable understanding of science fiction literature.
I’ve been starting Asimov’s “Robot Visions” and will move onto “I
Robot” soon. I’m fascinated by the concept of robots and the
ethical questions they pose. However, my bed is calling…

Reflection:

When do we finally realize that stress is choking our lives?  Along the way, somehow you decided that you’d head off the beaten path, forge one for yourself, and jump off the cliff?

Ha, it reminds me of the scene in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (sorry, haven’t read the book) when the whale is suddenly called into existence by the improbability drive.  It immediately begins attempting to conceive of its surroundings and body, greeting the world and wooshing air with newfound excitement…and then it hits the ground.

However, we humans cannot suddenly appear with an improbability button and if we do decide to start flying through the air, it usually involves some thought pre-flight or none at all.  I wonder then, when the fall downwards occurs, I suppose we either have conscious thoughts, or none at all.

For myself, this lengthy comparison describes my current life and the decisions needing to be made.  It’s almost as if I want to jump off the cliff but can’t decide which kind of landing gear I want to wear and am considering diving head first anyway.  Well, actually, it’s probably not that serious.  It’s more the stress before a decision.  The choices that need to be made before a leap. 

Thankfully, there is stress before a decision.  The excitement in not knowing what is at the bottom is unbearable, but the journey should be fantastic….right?  At least that’s what I’m hoping.

There are certain things we can’t take with us on a dive off a cliff.  I’ll make a list just in case you were wondering:

1) No laptops.

2) No pets. (they won’t enjoy the journey)

3) Pillows.  (hard as you try to cushion the fall, you have to trust your parachute)

4) The ground. (it is absolutely necessary that you let jump off the cliff, untie yourself from the tree, let go of that boulder…etc)

A drawn-out metaphor? Perhaps, but I’ve found personally the strength in living in the moment, trusting in my capabilities (which requires knowing your qualities and trusting that you are capable, believing you are capable), and I’ll probably forget this in the morning.

I’ll wake up, not excited that I have to roll out of bed to turn off my bleeping alarm, and I’ll start thinking about the cost of the day.  Which hours go where, how I’ll commute to school, if I’ll have any time to eat or exercise….and then maybe, just maybe, I’ll check my wordpress and remind myself that it’s okay to live one day at a time.  I’ll remember that I am able and armed with truth and that I am doing what I need to do.

Deep breath.  Lately, it seems I never have enough time in the morning.  My alarm clock is always set for 7, and yet I mysteriously wake up at 8.  In the midst of garbled dreams I decided that I wanted to start my day with a more substantial activity than getting up to set my alarm clock another 15 minutes later.

I actually love the morning.  There’s something so peaceful about the sunlight peeking through trees and a light blue sky awakening to a deeper hue.  I look out the window and I know it will be cold. Hum, I’m not in a mood to bundle up.  I want to burst out into the world and have it be 70 degrees and climbing.

Quite frequently, I’ll wake up with dialogue in my head.  Whether it is leftovers from my dreams that just don’t want to end, or a sign that I’m losing my mind, it feels natural to start writing in the morning. Oh, and I love breakfast.  However my own tends to be a boring bowl of cereal, if I had more time to be creative in the morning, I could plan a spectacular meal.

Sprawled out before my laptop, not even close to being fully dressed for the day, needing to leave in 24 minutes, I simply want release today.  Yes, release.  I want this deep peaceful morning breath to follow me onto the bus, keep me alive through my classes and give me the mental capacity to study calculus. 

I may be late…

And yes, I specifically meant to say “here” instead of “hear.”  I intend to do my roaring, whispering, and eating on this site.  Oh the wonders of the interwebs!

Never before have I had a blog (unless you include myspace, which…well, I don’t) and I intend to cultivate my antiquated writing skills.  It’s funny, well, interesting in an introspective way, this new blog thing.  I used to write all the time, poetry, short stories, songs (I love to sing, I love music ) and then somewhere along the way, it stopped.

Yet I will not call this a resurrection of my past, hopefully it will be something new, beautiful, and if you find my life and opinions interesting, well, enjoy.

 

Now the rubberband is on the other claw!