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NEWS & LETTERS, September-October 2005Workshop TalksMan-made disastersby Htun Lin Everything that followed the natural disaster Katrina was a man-made disaster, a disaster rooted in ideology. The difference is between those for whom the essential tenet of labor-unionism--an injury to one is an injury to all--means something and those for whom it doesn’t. The success of any society is not measured by the most powerful among us, but by the weakest in the worst of conditions. U.S. and UN statistics on infant mortality put our collective health index near the shameful level, somewhere below China and India--killing roughly 19,000 babies a year. Conservatives like to claim the problem is a breakdown in social order and discipline, as if only the direct parents and caregivers are responsible. The Speaker of the House and the mother of the President tried to blame the people trapped in New Orleans for not getting out. Bush and the movement that supports him hold fast to an ideology which does not believe in the public good and shared social responsibilities. At the hospital where I work, we are tested annually on our knowledge of evacuation plans in the event of any disasters. One thing stressed to us employees is to move patients to a safe location, away from hazards, and to call for rescue, such as firefighters and police. It made me wince to hear that so many patients were left behind in New Orleans hospitals and nursing homes. It goes without saying that we don’t leave our patients behind. It’s that kind of decency that is expected when patients get sick and come to a hospital to get well, but is absent from management’s ideology now. It’s what healthcare workers expect to do. We were all trained to be promoters of the safety and welfare of the patients in our charge--not as objects of budgetary designs, but as our fellow human beings. It was the absence of this basic human value, especially from government officials charged with this responsibility, that was painfully obvious in New Orleans in the aftermath of a natural storm. But the horror of floating bodies of patients was caused by another storm, a man-made one. The chaos and disorder caused by the destructive force of capitalist value expansion sweeps away naturally existing cooperation between human beings. No doubt the ignorant in powerful positions of authority will try to blame these deaths on individual caregivers (as I have seen so often in my shop)--caregivers who could no longer give the care they desperately struggle to give, with no electricity, no supplies, and without the help and support that were promised but never delivered. It is especially clear for those in the Superdome, who are Black or poor. The Superdome, whose dome fell apart, leaving its occupants unprotected, is an apt metaphor for the 40 million who are denied healthcare through lack of access to health insurance. No less harrowing are the 200,000 annual casualties of HMO business practices. We don’t have to look to spectacular natural disasters to witness the monumental breakdown in our civil society. Police outside New Orleans turned away refugees from Katrina at gunpoint. But even in our daily lives, under business-as-usual conditions, we turn away so many patients due to a deliberate withholding of healthcare resources. Many homeless are turned away due to a deliberate scarcity of shelters. Those who work inside our "managed care" system (what we workers call mangled care) have concretely experienced the transformation of our jobs from one that provides care to one that denies care. We cannot afford to wait one more day than we have to, once we see the opportunity for a new society, to re-create healthcare based on human needs, as soon as we have destroyed the idolatry of things and commodities as having more real significance than real human beings. We have concretely experienced the stress and trauma, the awesome toll of deliberate neglect in healthcare, long before something like Katrina came along. It’s no accident that the bulk of those denied access to healthcare are minorities and the working poor--just like those trapped inside the Superdome. The only way out of this man-made disaster is to begin by fundamentally changing the way we think about the nature of society. Only true individualism that recognizes its socially interdependent nature can change cognition from just reflecting on a disastrous reality, to creating a human-centered one where we live by the principle that an injury to one is an injury to all. |
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