| 1 | 2 | 3 | <<Back |
|---|
|
announced that it would begin evacuating the 1,500 indigenous people living on the Kilinailau Islands. Rising sea levels—attributed to global warming—have made life progressively more dismal as starvation and community degradation encroach with the tide. Saltwater intrusion has now reached the point where islanders can no longer grow the greens and breadfruit that had thus far sustained them. For some years islanders, who have never been much involved with the moneyed economy, have been dependent on emergency aid for survival. Scientists expect the Kilainailaus to be completely inundated by 2015. They will be the first inhabited lands permanently evacuated as a result of climate change. Their former residents will be the first climate change refugees. America constitutes five percent of the world's population. We produce 25 percent of carbon emissions. On his way to the talks in Rio that gave rise to the Kyoto treaty, former President George Bush Sr. trumpeted, “The American way of life is not up for negotiation.” He also said, “America today is a proud, free nation, decent and civil, a place we cannot help but love. We know in our hearts...that this country has meaning beyond what we see, and that our strength is a force for good.” When one-twentieth of the world's citizens are living large enough to create one-fourth of its greatest environmental threat,6 it takes willful ignorance not to see an important contradiction about this American way of life. There is something deeply wrong with a nation that calls itself a paragon of freedom while simultaneously limiting the ability of others to achieve anything comparable. (That is to say, it’s doubtful that John Winthrop’s ‘city on a hill’ vision included a plan to periodically raid the same communities that aspired to its great heights.) The American dream—the equality, and mobility that continue to bring people in droves7—is so sweet because other people are living a nightmare.8
|
The kicker, though, is this: by helping ourselves to other people’s services and resources rather than learning how to help ourselves, we are not doing America any favors. The paradoxical growth of freedom and dependence is just as applicable within our borders as beyond them. Consumer co-opted ‘freedom of choice’—exercised in excess via an American sense of entitlement—is making us lazy. (And fat.) It’s eroding the motivation for learning those life skills necessary should superstores, or the convenience they represent, ever disappear.
The sea change in the American understanding of freedom is making the world a little less inhabitable for people every day; every day Americans are a little less able to live without those people in the world. We’ve attached ourselves to a life-support system and fired the staff that man it.9
One more story. On May 8, 2005, Wal-Mart ran an ad in an Arizona newspaper in opposition to a proposal that, out of concern for local small-scale vendors, would restrict the company from opening a grocery in an existing store. The full-page picture, a photo of a 1933 Nazi book burning in Berlin, was accompanied with the text: “Should we let government tell us what we can read? Of course not . . . So why should we allow local government to limit where we shop?” This ad was one of a series. Others included a picture of a child praying and a person with duct tape over her mouth. The president of the consulting company that created the ads defended the action, saying, “We wanted people to think about the freedoms we enjoy in America.”
It is a thought that should send us running from the hill.
6. Here’s another way of looking at it: If the remaining 95 percent of the world consumed the way we do, we’d only need five more planets to sustain us all.
7. Average number of Mexicans who have died each year since 2000 trying to cross to the United States: 407.
8. It would be different—not justifiable, but maybe understandable—if Americans were marvelously happy. By 2020, heart disease and severe depression are projected to rank, respectively, 1 and 2 in the leading causes of death and disability.
9. Coincidence(?): 85 percent of medical expenses are spent on the last six months of life.