|
Katrina
and the Waves
The
recently sickening ravages of property and life wrought by Hurricane
Katrina have been extensively covered by the media, but with some
rather glaring omissions.
The
first was that a society based on the rights of property over life
had a great deal to do with exacerbating an already traumatic
situation. What we witnessed the most on television were pathetic
yet stark scenes of poor people huddled in a sports stadium, homes
lost forever, awaiting supplies and aid that took endless days to
arrive. During this time more people died, the ill were uncared for,
and conditions of existence plummeted to unsanitary levels often
associated with the shanty towns of South America or Turkish prisons,
but not with the United States of America. While these already
traumatised people had to endure an additional trauma of abandonment
and lack of the basic wherewithal to survive, millions of homes and
offices unused and awaiting buyers sat empty around the country. But
they were not available to the million homeless of New Orleans, whose
life savings had been lost in homes rendered rubble, or who simply
never had the savings to invest in their own house.
Nobody
on television asked the most salient question of all: “should
people struck by terrible tragedy be victims of charity at all, or
should they instead be automatically entitled to society’s
wealth simply by demonstrating clear-cut needs for homes, hygiene,
food, clothes, and comfort?” Society as
presently constituted is not geared toward the satisfaction of our
needs, but rather to the sale of commodities to yield profits, and
such a society proved itself demonstrably incapable of meeting needs
of the dire and desperate kinds that followed on the heels of
Katrina. But hey, there are already millions of homeless and poor
people in the United States who are not entitled to those vast
numbers of empty homes awaiting purchase, so why should these victims
of extreme weather be any more fortunate?
Had
you or I decided to by-pass the sleeping government and simply pick
up a couple of homeless individuals and drop them off in another
town, we would have had to do so only by taking time off work. Most
of us, as workers, have commitments to our employers that may not be
so casually by-passed. And in capitalism, even relief efforts are
subject to the welfare agencies’
budgetary constraints. Ever heard of the tens of millions of
starving and ill children who die each and ever year around the world
for whom there is simply not enough money to go around? While relief
for those left in New Orleans was certainly offered by the Red Cross
and eventually by the state, few asked whether it is sane or even
effective to meet critical human needs depending upon how much money
or how many volunteers may be assembled. What if those of you
donating a few dollars at supermarkets for Katrina victims simply
don’t raise enough? Does that mean that
the plight of those struck by disaster is entirely the result of your
personal failures, or of a society in which wealth is produced only
to be sold, and not to meet our needs? We socialists think the
latter.
Nobody
on television asked whether by rights the wealth of society should
not be automatically due to all individuals. Thus, the million New
Orleanians with homes tragically destroyed suddenly enter into that
category of “homeless,”
those without the monetary means to buy or rent. Nobody on the idiot
box asked the most obvious question: “why
shouldn’t homes be available to anybody
who needs them?”
A
further question never raised in recent television coverage was about
the severity of the storm itself. Many scientists around the world
are now convinced that the ecological devastation wrought by modern
society has played its part in altering global weather patterns, even
while conservative politicians and owners of polluting industry deny
such hypotheses and try hard to keep them from being discussed in the
media. Tropical forests are vanishing at the rate of city sizes per
day, ice is melting at the polar caps, storms are increasing and
worsening, temperatures are rising, ozone levels are diminishing. Quite
a few scientists have made calculations that if present levels
of ecological destruction continue unabated for the next ten, twenty
or thirty years, then catastrophic alterations in weather will no
longer be avoidable, even if pollution were stopped after such a
date. While it is difficult to be certain if the damage to the
planet caused by capitalist production has been responsible for
recent changes for the worse in weather, one thing is clear –
such dire warnings from the scientific community are not going to be
taken seriously. This leaves us rightly concerned whether we are
heading into an era in which such similarly devastating phenomena as
Hurricane Katrina will not be exceptions, but the rule. What are you
all going to do about it? When will citizens take control, and stop
leaving critical decision making to leaders of all parties led by the
supremacy of corporate interests. What are you personally going to
do to render this planet a joy to share, to create a society for you
and your children that meets our needs?
The
World Socialist Party of the United States is a companion party of
the World Socialist Movement. It aims to bring about a nonviolent
revolution in the ownership of the means of production from private
or state to common. In such a society, money will no longer be
necessary, as the things and services we require to live fully (food,
clothes, medical services, homes, transportation, and other modern
human needs) will be freely available to all. This is because the
means of production will be owned in common by the entire community,
and will be democratically controlled by that community as well, a
society in which leaders are replaced by truly democratic decision
making of all citizens.
In
a society of common ownership, all war in such a nationless world
will be immediately abolished, while the end of starvation and dire
poverty will quickly follow suit. Without the barriers of economic
cost holding back human progress, more ecologically sustainable ways
to provide energy and production for ourselves will be immediately
planned and created on a global basis. We will become for the first
time in history a truly human family looking after itself.
Dr.
Who (World Socialist Party of US)
To
contents  Page 9
To
Socialist Party
Page
links
|
Page
1
|
Page
2 |
Page
3 |
Page
4 |
Page
5 |
Page
6 |
Page
7 |
Page
8 |
Page
9 |
Page
10 |
Page
11 |
Page
12 |
Page
13 |
Page
14 |
Page
15 |
Page
16 |
Page
17 |
Page
18 |
Page
19 |
Page
20 |
|
