The mountain road near a small town was designed so poorly that cars regularly plunged over the edge of a few too-sharp turns. The cost of rescuing these accident victims and providing them medical care overtaxed the town’s limited resources, but fortunately, some of its residents were pretty well off, and they created a charitable fund that helped keep the town’s emergency services afloat. After every accident, donations would come in to help offset the costs, and for many years, the system sustained itself well enough.
Eventually, the townsfolk got tired of the continual expense. Some of them argued that since that stretch of road was not within the town’s borders, they should simply call in the county whenever an accident occurred on it. Fortunately, this was just a small, fatigued minority. The rest still believed that they had a responsibility to help anyone in need who came their way. The delays introduced by leaving everything to the county would cost lives, and in any case, the county was hard up for money as well.
They decided to keep up the rescue efforts, but to also do what they could to make the road safer. They spent some of their emergency services budget on warning signs and stronger traffic barriers, in the hope that they would pay for themselves by decreasing the need for those services. It worked to some extent, but didn’t reduce the crashes as much as they’d hoped.
The town finally had to face the fact that the road really needed to be redesigned. Some quailed at the prospect, because it would involve enormous short term effort and expense educating the public about the need, navigating the maze of county and state bureaucracies, fighting whatever political battles might arise along the way, and finally paying their share of the taxes for the actual construction work. In many ways, it would be easier just maintaining the rescue services forever! (And it wasn’t like they could stop funding the rescue services while engaged in the larger fight.)
They finally concluded that the ultimate humanitarian gesture was to fix the road, however unrelated the endless public hearings and engineering studies and political backroom deals might seem to the accident victims lying dazed in their gurneys. Along the way, they encountered the usual incompetence, malfeasance, and willful ignorance, but in the end (late and over budget, of course) the job was done, and it really did make a difference. The accident rate along that stretch of road dropped to normal levels, and the town no longer had to devote extraordinary resources to their emergency services. The freed-up funds rippled out to other areas of the budget, allowing the town to improve parts of their infrastructure that had long gone neglected. The effect applied to the private donations that used to be made as well. They now found their way to other good causes.
Such as the relief efforts for the latest global humanitarian crisis: the earthquake that struck the impoverished nation of Haiti, leaving hundreds of thousands dead or homeless.
Here we are, dealing with yet another rescue effort.
It’s good that we are. It’s actually amazing that in these economic times, governments and private citizens all over the world have given as much as they have. Global “compassion fatigue” has not yet set in. However, like the residents of the parabolic town above, we should be thinking not just about how to provide immediate relief to the victims of the latest catastrophe, but about how to fix the structural defects that exacerbate the damage done by these natural disasters.
If an earthquake of the same magnitude struck any part of the United States, the death toll would be a drop in the bucket compared to what happened in Haiti. Why? Because we’re richer. We can afford to make most of our housing earthquake safe. The victims in Haiti were stacked densely into substandard housing, with practically no civil infrastructure or health services even before the earthquake. Why is Haiti so poor? The debilitating effects of past colonialism, followed by a Cold War world that only cared about the uses that could be made of any small nation, followed by a present world order that doesn’t have the political will to acknowledge or repair such damages.
We can and should do all that we can to rescue the victims of the recent accident, but unless we also, simultaneously, work toward fixing the road itself, we’re only dooming ourselves to a future of being endlessly surprised and horrified when these “accidents” recur. Next year, it will be another Asian tsunami. The year after that, an earthquake in Brazil. A few years later, drought and famine in Africa. The natural phenomena themselves will be unavoidable. As long as world population remains as high as it is, we’ll have to house some people in risky areas. However, the catastrophic results of those disasters, the high death tolls and the complete wreckage of civil infrastructure, will be due to man-made conditions that existed beforehand and that will continue to exist long after. That will continue to exist until we fix them.
Tags: earthquake, Haiti, poverty, relief, wealth inequality