Conflicted

Conflicted

by Marco M. Pardi

Untold stories of Tonio

“Feelings are like kids — you can’t let them drive, but you can’t put them in the trunk.” As quoted on Best Friends Animal Society newsletter.

“Inaction in a deed of mercy becomes an action in a deadly sin.”

Ancient Buddhist Apocrypha.

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As Tonio and Maartje waited for the televised evening news to appear they again saw the ad begging for donations to feed starving children in East Africa. Of course, there were the shots of skeletal children, too weak to react to the flies leaching moisture from their sunken eyes. Some of the children were likely weakened by diarrheal diseases, a leading cause of childhood mortality in much of the world. Other co-morbidities were likely worsened by severe malnutrition. Some of the children were likely already dead before the ad aired, or soon thereafter.

Although Tonio and Maartje were in remarkable physical condition, they had known hunger in periods of their childhood. And, Tonio had been in several parts of the world, seeing these now televised conditions first hand. He knew that many would not believe that pockets of hunger existed in many parts of the United States as well. Yet, one of his duties in Graduate School, in addition to teaching and on-site meetings with street gangs, had been to conduct on-site ethnography to develop an Ecology of the Inner-City Child. The locus of the study was the inner city of a large Mid-Western metropolis so crime ridden and dangerous the federal government dynamited the public housing projects to the ground just weeks after he finished.

During the months he spent there, sitting in on classes in K-8^th grade schools, he saw the implementation of a school breakfast program for the children. What at first seemed like a marvelous idea soon soured as he checked the huge waste bins in the cafeterias. After each group of children left the bins were filled with uneaten foods, particularly excellent apples and other untouched materials. Cookies and other sweets were never in evidence. The bins were emptied daily into the garbage. He recounted this to Maartje as the ad finished. She muted the sound on the television.

Maartje was a fast, voracious reader with total comprehension and almost total recall. She was blazing through Tonio’s library faster than he could replenish it. And so, she well understood the variables behind food scarcity; things like war, drought, single crop economies formed by exploitative colonials, failure to control human population growth, and cultural preferences for some foods over others. She understood Tonio’s discussion of how Nixon’s illegal bombing campaign of neutral Laos and Cambodia, centered on the agricultural heartlands through which ran the Ho Chi Minh trail, had brought starvation to the Cambodians and Laotians, throwing them into the arms of the waiting North Vietnamese and Chinese. Nixon had brought about the very “Domino Theory” result everyone feared. Decades later much of that farmland is dangerous due to unexploded munitions, including cluster bombs and landmines.

She understood Tonio’s recollections of warlords appropriating foodstuffs and blocking the influx of regular agricultural trade. And the seduction of Central and South American countries into devoting their lands to single crops which the U.S. manipulated for lowest cost or abandoned when they could be found cheaper elsewhere.

Maartje, a master of facts and figures, recited what she had learned from recent surveys: According to PBS about 40% of the food produced in the U.S. either rots in the field, is trashed at the market, or thrown away at home. The typical American family of four wastes 1,160 pounds of food annually. The UNFAO -Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations, estimates that, world wide, one-third of food produced for human consumption – 2.8 trillion pounds, is lost or wasted from farm to kitchen each year. Much of it is discarded before market because it is cosmetically not “pleasing”. This means about 55 billion cubic meters of fresh water are wasted to grow crops not eaten. Meat eaters worsen the water problem as it takes 20-50 times more water to produce a kilo of meat than a kilo of vegetable matter. She then enumerated the figures on federal subsidies to farmers and ranchers to not produce particular foods so as to keep the prices up. Yet, human population numbers continue to climb unchecked.

Tonio recalled that since the successful tele-scam artist Jerry Falwell and his Christian Right Moral Majority had completely bought control of the Republican Party every Republican administration since Reagan had ordered USAID- United States Agency for International Development- to withhold all money from any and all foreign health clinics that had so much as a table and chair devoted to Family Planning, specifically contraception and abortion. Any Foreign Service Officers found to have knowingly overlooked such services were terminated immediately. Thus, health and emergency medical services of all kinds were put in jeopardy or simply collapsed from loss of funding. Entire clinics were closed.

Why? Because the prevailing “religious” belief was that sexual intercourse was for procreation. But wait, there’s more, he said. The Republican Party is fundamentally parasitic. It realized it could use the cloak of religion to conceal its tactic of ensuring that developing nations could be forced into extractive compliance through carefully managed and enforced impoverishment. People barely able to feed themselves and their growing families were powerless to refuse the exploitation of agricultural production and precious metals mining at subsistence level reimbursement. Furthermore, keeping a nation at or barely above subsistence level while paying off its government officials ensured that the nation would be unable to develop programs similar to the Social Security, MediCare, or MediCaid, programs Republicans vilify as “socialist” and do all in their power to destroy. The results were obvious: the “Man on the Street” fathered many children as a safety net for when he and his wife became too old or too ill to work. With little to no organized health care infant and childhood mortality rates were gruesome. One could not chance having only one or two children trusting they would one day become working adults who could take care of them. Hence, the scattershot approach to family size, trusting some would get through.

And so, the conflict. Many countries were nearing a Malthusian equation of available nutrition levels governing population levels. But numbers on a spreadsheet are a far different image from skeletal children in person, or even on television. What kind of person can watch these ads on television and sit back saying, Let Nature take its course? The very same people who block corrective aid while intoning the word Socialism, a word intended to strike fear into the hearts of people fortunate enough to have their futures assured through investments in their company’s 401K stock market program. Yes, deregulate those industries to maximize profit no matter how many people die from the consequences.

Rushing to gather food otherwise wasted and supplying it to these populations would seem to be the right move. But all that does is address the immediate need. In the long run it may even make conditions worse as more people survive and go on to spawn more children. An entire restructuring of the economic system system in those countries is required. After all, the fundamental principle of economics is the production and distribution of goods, not the hoarding by some and the lack by many. The bottom line in economics is Access to Power. A couple who needs to ensure their future financial stability and care by raising enough children for some to mature and survive has no access to power.

It is true, as Maartje observed, that the mortality rate of infants and children had dropped tremendously during the latter 20^th century and into the 21^st. But still, every day an average of 15,000 children die, most from preventable causes. “The number of child deaths is that of 24 jumbo jet crashes, with only children on board, every single day” (OurWorldInData.org). Worldwide, the rate is 4.5%. Pneumonia is the leading cause of childhood death, followed by diarrheal diseases and malaria. Each of these diseases, and several other significant causes of infant and child deaths, is worsened, perhaps fatally, by a common denominator: Malnutrition.

What to do, they asked each other. As individuals, we are powerless to do anything without risking that we would make matters worse.The world needs to take steps to assist the living, while at the same time taking major cultural steps to correct existing social and religious policies and to develop new policies which prevent the problem from just climbing to a higher level where the stakes are far more catastrophic, making the Malthusian theorem come true. Perhaps, one day, we can write about it.