The Man-Made Part Of Natural Disasters

Frankie and Laurel‘s recent posts have me thinking . People die of curable diseases because they can’t afford the cure. Even in San Francisco they die. I know such a person.

Years ago, when I helped coordinate the adult religious education class in my church, we had to deal every year with the question of theodicy. Why does God let bad things happen to good people? Who is bad enough to deserve death by starvation, plague, earthquake, tsunami?

It’s an old and difficult question. But it gets a lot easier when you eliminate the long list of “natural” disasters that are caused or made much worse by the conscious decisions of human beings.

Examine the list of famines caused by war: burning of fields, mining of rice paddies, troops fighting in large open spaces where the crops are grown.  Study the plagues caused by the intentional contamination of a people’s water supply to force surrender in war or the unconscious contamination by people upstream who have no choice about what they put into the water for the people downstream because they have no other means of washing and dumping. The knowledge and resources exist, but the political will does not.

Earthquakes, of course, are natural. But the disaster is often man made. In Afghanistan, poor neighborhoods were devastated while wealthier neighborhoods incurred very little damage because buildings in poor neighborhoods were flimsy while buildings in other neighborhoods were earthquake resistant.

As Frankie and Laurel point out, it’s not the disease, it’s not even lack of healthcare; it’s lack of access to healthcare.

The United States suffers from the disease of poverty. In our business, we often see the causes of poverty listed as “lack of job skills, lack of work history, physical disability, mental illness, alcoholism and addiction.”

But these are not the causes of poverty. The causes of poverty are lack of job training, lack of job mentorship, lack of accommodation and training for people with disabilities, lack of residential recovery programs, lack of services and supportive housing for people with mental illness, lack of affordable housing for the underemployed.

Why don’t we have enough of these things? Is it because we can’t afford them? In the United States? In CALIFORNIA? As a homeless activist I used to know said, “This is not a poor country. Someone is making a decision.”

We need to re-examine that decision. We need new priorities.