There were a pair of headlines in El País this morning, arranged opposite each other, in separate columns, and each was accompanied by an image (http://www.elpais.com/ ).
One headline reads ‘La epidemia de cólera se extiende con mayor virulencia por Haití,’ or ‘The Cholera Epidemic Continues to Spread Throughout Haiti with Greater Virulence.’ It is accompanied by a cropped photograph of a boy who might be eight or nine years old, with a drip in his arm, lying on a long table in a make-shift clinic, somewhere in Haiti. Beside the boy is another, even smaller child, who lies on his back with his arms open and his feet dangling off the edge of the same bench. You can see the smaller child’s hands and still-sandaled feet, but the rest of his body, including his face, is covered with a white sheet.
Beside that photograph and headline there is a cropped photograph of the painting (or print?) by Roy Lichtenstein called Ohhh Alright, which sold recently for a phenomenal sum of money at a an auction organized by Christie’s in New York. The headline reads, ‘Lluvia de millones para grandes iconos ‘pop art,’ or ‘Rain of Millions for the Great Icons of Pop Art.’
I wonder: was this juxtaposition done on purpose; and if so, for which purpose? Was it cynical irony on the part of the layout team, or did they fail to see the implications: the ‘rain’ of millions of Euros for dubious works of ‘art’ (€27,500,000, or $37,675,000 for the Lichtenstein) side by side with an AP photograph of a child—only one of the 643 dead so far—who was not saved from the ravages of cholera, and probably died as a result of dehydration, something that can be dealt with effectively if the child is treated on time with a cheap rehydration formula (effective homemade solutions can be made out of salt, sugar and clean water).
According to UNICEF—though no one disputes this sad fact—dehydration, often caused by either cholera or rotavirus, is the second leading cause of death among children under the age of five. There can be little doubt that it is the most treatable of all the causes of death among children.
Without begrudging the new owner of the Lichtenstein his work of art, we might nonetheless wonder—again—why it is so damn hard to provide clean drinking water (just one means of avoiding a cholera epidemic) to poor people around the world.
Without questioning the hierarchy of values and commitments to such ideals as not only a free market—¡which rarely exists anywhere save in theory!—but an absolutely unfettered market for goods like the Lichtenstein, we might nonetheless wonder why some small share of the excess in our free market economies can’t go to projects which would effectively provide the millions of people throughout the world who live without the comfort, convenience and safety of being able to open a faucet to obtain clean drinking water, with the right to do so.
Maybe the intention of those who placed these incongruous images side by side was precisely to get us to think about this. If so, here are a couple of useful links which can aid and direct our thought.
International Action Clean Water in Haiti: http://www.haitiwater.org/
There is considerable debate concerning the long term usefulness of providing aid in the form of charitable donations, given some of the secondary effects related to dependency. But there can be little doubt about the need for resources—such as wells and pumps and pipes and so on—which ultimately require some expenditure. Personally I think that all of us who can afford to do so should give 0.7% of our annual gross income or annual expenditures to those development projects which we can identify with. This was the millennium goal set by the UN in 1970, and it was meant to be applied to its member states. For all of those who disdain or merely distrust the government and wish to see it play a smaller role in our lives, I urge you to take it upon yourself to do something like this, rather than waiting for the government you elected to do so.
Millennium Project: http://www.unmillenniumproject.org/press/07.htm
Finally, just in case there is any doubt, I am entirely in favor of supporting the arts! So if you don’t want your 0.7% to go to development projects, you could always donate that money to a library, theatre, or artistic organization.
And in the meantime, if you need any books, this is the best place to shop, with free delivery within the U.S. and the cheapest international rates I have found anywhere ($3.97), including a five cents surcharge for CO2 emissions. Each purchase from Betterworld contains a donation, on their part, to world literacy programs.