The Largest Minority

January 18th, 2010 @ 1:13am by Manila Ryce

There are many possible responses to the devastating earthquake in Haiti: shock, horror, profound sadness, empathy and the urge to help.

Tens of thousands of people are dead and much of the capital city, Port-au-Prince, its edge-city slum Carrefour, and its one relatively prosperous suburb, Pétionville, have been reduced to rubble. Those are appropriate responses, but what comes after must be a wholesale rethinking of what international aid can and should do.

Blaming the victim, as in the last paragraph of a lead New York Times article that appeared on the day after the earthquake, is patently absurd.

Simon Romero and Marc Lacey, with others contributing, wrap up their reporting on the human tragedy in Port-au-Prince with the following: “Haiti’s many man-made woes — its dire poverty, political infighting and history of insurrection — have been worsened repeatedly by natural disasters.”

It is true that Haiti has known a remarkable combination of political violence and natural disasters over the course of its history. Are we to infer, though, that Haitians would be better off today had the insurrection that began in 1791 and led to the emancipation of slaves and the creation of the first independent black republic in 1804 not occurred?

Furthermore, should we understand from the phrase “political infighting” that Haitians are their own worst enemies and that they are solely responsible for the man-made woes (and maybe even what insurers call “acts of God”) that befall them? Are we to conclude, after absorbing the lengthy descriptions of death and destruction, that they brought it on themselves?

This paragraph at the end of an article that seems to otherwise bravely and objectively report the facts is part of a long-standing and dispiriting pattern of demonizing Haitians by erasing relevant aspects of their past. (Think: Pat Robertson.) Haiti is often — all too often — referred to as a basket case, a country on the verge of social, political and ecological collapse without any mention of how it might have arrived at that state.

The fact is that many of Haiti’s problems today stem from the response of nations that saw its insurrection as a threat or a taunt. In 1825, the French engaged in a bit of gunboat diplomacy and demanded that Haiti pay compensation of some 150 million francs — a sum derived by figuring the value of the property, in the form of slaves and land, that French planters had lost — or face a total economic blockade. This amount was roughly equal to 10 years’ worth of total revenue in Haiti.

By the end of the 19th century, Haiti’s payments to France still consumed around 80 percent of the national budget. One generation of Haitians had bought its freedom with its blood, and the generations that followed had to pay cash.

In the 20th century, the United States twice occupied Haiti, once from 1915 to 1934, with soldiers bringing the attitudes of the Jim Crow South along for the trip; and again from 1994 to 2000, the second time with arguably better intentions but ambiguous objectives and, consequently, poor results.

Many have argued that the “structural adjustment” imposed on Haiti by the International Monetary Fund in the 1990s led to the liquidation of state assets but promoted little in the way of private investment and, it almost goes without saying, did nothing to benefit the average Haitian. Is it any wonder that the country is characterized by crushing poverty and political instability?

To say this is not to remove all blame from the Haitians themselves. The country’s tiny economic elite has done little other than consolidate its own power in the past 200 years. More recently, groups that opposed former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who was democratically elected twice, opted out of a nascent and fragile democratic process, giving it little chance of survival.

And massive emigration has deprived Haiti of many of its most highly skilled citizens, though who could blame them for leaving? Regardless, the responsibility for Haiti’s problems in popular accounts is almost always exclusively borne by Haitians.

The question, then, is what a more nuanced knowledge of Haiti’s past can bring to an understanding of and response to the present catastrophe. People who are reduced, in the imaginations of those who might help them, to violent, irrational, incompetent people solely responsible for their fate are not likely to receive the help they need.

Having lived in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, I worry that what happened there might be repeated in Haiti; namely, the transformation of hungry, frightened and displaced people into a “security threat” first and people in need of immediate and sustained care second, if at all.

Looking further down the road, we need to find ways to help Haiti rebuild its public institutions so that it can rebuild a city and suburbs that were home to 3 million people. Aid needs to be rethought to empower Haitians, not repeatedly “save” them. Perpetuating the boom-and-bust cycle of aid and intervention of that past century is not the solution.

Right now, though, the people of Port-au-Prince and surrounding areas need our help. They need clean water (difficult to find for many Haitians in the best of times), medicine, food, clothing, shelter and other basic necessities of survival.

What they clearly do not need, though, is pity mixed with scorn.

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January 14th, 2010 @ 3:19pm by Manila Ryce

We at the ANSWER Coalition extend our heartfelt solidarity to all of our Haitian sisters and brothers, as well as to all those who have friends and family there, as Haiti copes with the destruction and grief of the massive 7.0 magnitude earthquake that struck yesterday.

All of us are joining in the outpouring of solidarity from people all over the hemisphere and world who are sending humanitarian aid and assistance to the people of Haiti.

At such a moment, it is also important to put this catastrophe into a political and social context. Without this context, it is impossible to understand both the monumental problems facing Haiti and, most importantly, the solutions that can allow Haiti to survive and thrive. Hillary Clinton said today, “It is biblical, the tragedy that continues to daunt Haiti and the Haitian people.” This hypocritical statement that blames Haiti’s suffering exclusively on an “act of God” masks the role of U.S. and French imperialism in the region.

In this email message, we have included some background information about Haiti that helps establish the real context:

Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive stated today that as many as 100,000 Haitians may be dead. International media is reporting bodies being piled along streets surrounded by the rubble from thousands of collapsed buildings. Estimates of the economic damage are in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Haiti’s large shantytown population was particularly hard hit by the tragedy.

As CNN, ABC and every other major corporate media outlet will be quick to point out, Haiti is the poorest country in the entire Western hemisphere. But not a single word is uttered as to why Haiti is poor. Poverty, unlike earthquakes, is no natural disaster.

The answer lies in more than two centuries of U.S. hostility to the island nation, whose hard-won independence from the French was only the beginning of its struggle for liberation.

In 1804, what had begun as a slave uprising more than a decade earlier culminated in freedom from the grips of French colonialism, making Haiti the first Latin American colony to win its independence and the world’s first Black republic. Prior to the victory of the Haitian people, George Washington and then-Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson had supported France out of fear that Haiti would inspire uprisings among the U.S. slave population. The U.S. slave-owning aristocracy was horrified at Haiti’s newly earned freedom.

U.S. interference became an integral part of Haitian history, culminating in a direct military occupation from 1915 to 1934. Through economic and military intervention, Haiti was subjugated as U.S. capital developed a railroad and acquired plantations. In a gesture of colonial arrogance, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was the assistant secretary of the Navy at the time, drafted a constitution for Haiti which, among other things, allowed foreigners to own land. U.S. officials would later find an accommodation with the dictator François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, and then his son Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, as Haiti suffered under their brutal repressive policies.

In the 1980s and 1990s, U.S. policy toward Haiti sought the reorganization of the Haitian economy to better serve the interests of foreign capital. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) was instrumental in shifting Haitian agriculture away from grain production, paving the way for dependence on food imports. Ruined Haitian farmers flocked to the cities in search of a livelihood, resulting in the swelling of the precarious shantytowns found in Port-au-Prince and other urban centers.

Who has benefited from these policies? U.S. food producers profited from increased exports to Haitian markets. Foreign corporations that had set up shop in Haitian cities benefitted from the super-exploitation of cheap labor flowing from the countryside. But for the people of Haiti, there was only greater misery and destitution.

Washington orchestrated the overthrow of the democratically elected Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide—not once, but twice, in 1991 and 2004. Haiti has been under a U.S.-backed U.N. occupation for nearly six years. Aristide did not earn the animosity of U.S. leaders for his moderate reforms; he earned it when he garnered support among Haiti’s poor, which crystallized into a mass popular movement. Two hundred years on, U.S. officials are still horrified by the prospect of a truly independent Haiti.

The unstable, makeshift dwellings imposed upon Haitians by Washington’s neoliberal policies have now, for many, been turned into graves. Those same policies are to blame for the lack of hospitals, ambulances, fire trucks, rescue equipment, food and medicine. The blow dealt by such a natural disaster to an economy made so fragile from decades of plundering will greatly magnify the suffering of the Haitian people.

Natural disasters are inevitable, but resource allocation and planning can play a decisive role in mitigating their impact and dealing with the aftermath. Haiti and neighboring Cuba, who are no strangers to violent tropical storms, were both hit hard in 2008 by a series of hurricanes—which, unlike earthquakes, are predictable. While more than 800 lives were lost in Haiti, less than 10 people died in Cuba. Unlike Haiti, Cuba had a coordinated evacuation plan and post-hurricane rescue efforts that were centrally planned by the Cuban government. This was only possible because Cuban society is not organized according to the needs of foreign capital, but rather according to the needs of the Cuban people.

In a televised speech earlier today, President Obama has announced that USAID and the Departments of State and Defense will be working to support the rescue and relief efforts in Haiti in the coming days. Ironically, these are the same government entities responsible for the implementation of the economic and military policies that reduced Haiti to ruins even before the earthquake hit.

On March 20, thousands of people will march in Los Angeles to to oppose the wars and occupations in Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine. Tens of thousands more will march in Washington, D.C. and San Francisco at the same time. We will also demand an end the foreign occupation of Haiti and reparations to Haiti for the vast wealth that has been looted from the country by foreign imperialist countries.

January 14th, 2010 @ 3:07pm by Manila Ryce

For the new year, let’s resolve: Don’t defend Democrats when they don’t deserve defending. And that certainly includes President Obama.

Let’s further resolve: Put principles above party and never lose our voice on human rights and social justice.

When we mute ourselves as a Democratic president pursues corporatist or militarist policies, we only encourage such policies.

If it was wrong for Bush to bail out Wall Street with virtually no controls, then it’s wrong for Obama. If indefinite “preventative detention” was wrong under Bush, then it’s wrong under Obama. If military occupation and deepening troop deployments were wrong under Bush, then they’re wrong under Obama.

Imagine if McCain had defeated Obama in 2008 and soon tripled the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan. I have little doubt that activists would have mobilized major opposition, denouncing the reality of more U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq combined than even Bush had deployed.

But as Obama goes about tripling the troops in Afghanistan, with more U.S. soldiers in war zones that Bush ever had - and proposes the biggest military budget in world history - many activists have lost their voices.

When Obama’s West Point speech on Afghanistan paid lip service to benchmarks and a timeline (as even Bush learned to do on Iraq), how did the once independent MoveOn react? Its leaders sent out a muted petition urging - benchmarks and a timeline. The email might as well have been written by Rahm Emanuel in the West Wing.

Taking cues from the Obama White House, liberal groups went quiet on Wall Street bailouts and bonuses - thus helping rightwing teabaggers and corporate-fronts to pose as populist saviors of the middle class.

By going soft on the White House or Democratic Congressional leaders, most netroots groups have undermined genuine progressives in Congress - on issues from Iraq and Afghanistan to Wall Street and healthcare.

Instead of launching their healthcare reform efforts behind an easily-explained, cost-effective “Enhanced Medicare for All” bill co-sponsored by dozens of progressive Congress members, netroots leaders meekly made a “public option” their starting demand and pretended not to notice when Rahm Emanuel began signaling last spring that the White House had no intention of pushing for it.

Predictably, we’ve ended up with corporate-enrichment legislation that forcibly delivers tens of millions of customers to big insurers and big pharma - with almost no cost controls because of private deals cut in the White House. In the New York Times before Christmas, beneath an accurate header “Corporate Glee,” a news article asserted: “The insurance companies were probably among the merriest of industries last week . . . But the drug companies were certainly joyful, too.” Insurance stocks are soaring on Wall Street.

It’s tragically ironic that netroots forces joined Democratic leaders in killing Medicare for All as an unrealistic starting demand and now are belatedly urging “kill the bill.”

I’m old enough to remember that when Democrats are in majority power - controlling both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue - they are capable of horrific policies. With Lyndon Johnson in the White House, most Democrats in Congress went along with Vietnam escalation. And with President Clinton, some leading Congressional Democrats joined mostly Republicans in backing the anti-worker, anti-environmental NAFTA.

The good news - during the eras of Vietnam and NAFTA - is that large numbers of progressive activists stood fast to their principles and vocally opposed those wrong-headed Democratic policies. They didn’t follow Democratic leaders over the cliff or pretend that Democratic presidents are automatically “on our side” or well-intentioned.

And back then we lacked the most awesome tool ever invented for independent grassroots mobilization: the Internet.

The Net has helped unleash a golden age for independent media - and for journalists unafraid to challenge leaders of both parties: folks like Glenn Greenwald, Jeremy Scahill, Arianna Huffington, Matt Taibbi and Amy Goodman, to name a few.

Thanks to the Internet and independent media, progressive activists are more fully and more quickly informed about national and global issues than ever. Yet many activists are poorly represented by national netroots groups that often function as appendages of the Democratic leadership.

While independent progressive media are booming on the Internet, the largest netroots political-action groups are sorely lacking in independence.

Be it resolved: In 2010, we will not apologize for indefensible Democratic policies, and we will no longer support netroots groups that fail to resist such policies.

December 11th, 2009 @ 10:23pm by Manila Ryce

Kabataang maka-Bayan (KmB) is a progressive Filipino youth organization of which I’m honored to be a part of. On November 29th, KmB held Carnival ng Masa, or The Peoples Carnival, to celebrate their ten-year anniversary. There were corn dogs and games, but the highlight of the evening was the educational, yet entertaining multimedia performance at the end of the night. All 11 videos documenting the performance are embedded in the playlist above. Enjoy the show and please subscribe to our YouTube channel.

December 7th, 2009 @ 12:35am by Manila Ryce

[The following speech was given on November 30, 2009 at the United Nations as part of the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People.]

Mr. Chairman, Mr. Secretary-General, Mr. President, Excellencies:

Let me begin by expressing my appreciation to the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People for inviting me to participate in today’s meeting and offering a presentation in connection with the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People.

My name is Bill Fletcher, Jr. I am the Executive Editor of the on-line magazine BlackCommentator.com and a member of the leadership committee of the coalition known as the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation. I am the immediate past president of the advocacy group TransAfrica Forum which was the leading voice within the United States of America against South African apartheid and white minority rule in Africa. I am also a long-time trade union activist.

I sit before you today to discuss a contemporary apartheid: that practiced by the state of Israel against the Palestinian people.

As an African American in and from the United States, I am keenly aware of the similarities between the systems of Israeli apartheid, South African apartheid, and the home-grown apartheid in the United States of America once known as “Jim Crow segregation.” Despite every effort of the Israeli state to wrap its actions in religious garments, to claim a God-given Judaic exclusive right for its actions, the description of the racial differential or national-ethnic differential that exists between the officially sanctioned Jewish citizens of Israel and the Palestinians within Israel, those in exile and those in the Occupied Territories sounds all too familiar. It is also far from Holy. Notwithstanding the efforts of heroic individuals such as William Patterson, Paul Robeson and Malcolm X to bring the case of African Americans before the United Nations, the international ramifications of the oppression suffered here were often and conveniently ignored by the great powers of the global North. The South African apartheid system was, to a great extent, modeled on the Jim Crow system in the United States, a fact noted by many people in South Africa and in the global South. The United Nations failed to take up the challenge to racism in my own country a generation ago; it must not fail to take up the struggle against Israeli apartheid today.

The realities of the Israeli apartheid system, in contrast to South Africa, were often hidden from view, at least outside of Israel and, later, the Occupied Territories. It was, however, the close collaboration-including military and nuclear collaboration-between the Israeli regime and the South African apartheid regime at a point when the South African apartheid regime had become an international pariah state that raised more than a few eyebrows and encouraged many people to more closely examine the theory and workings of the two states.

The parallel between the Israeli apartheid system and the Jim Crow system under which African Americans suffered and died here in the United States of America also helps to explain a phenomenon that seems to puzzle many mainstream commentators. How is it that there exists such a relatively large reservoir of sympathy among African Americans in the United States of America for the cause of the Palestinians? It is a vicious slander to assert that such sympathy is based on anti-Jewish sentiment, though I would be na? to ignore that such sentiment does exist in some isolated quarters. Rather, for African Americans, we can at one and the same time stand with the Jewish victims of the Nazi’s Holocaust, while at the same time reject the Israeli apartheid system and its victimization of the Palestinian people. The horrors of the Holocaust, as the great Martiniquan writer Aime Cesaire pointed out, were not unprecedented, but found their basis in the brutal holocausts committed against the peoples of the global South by the colonial powers and the settler states. It was based on that shared history that African Americans viscerally understood and, therefore, placed ourselves in opposition to the racist motivations that lay behind the actions of the German Nazis and later the Italian Fascists in their persecution and then attempts at annihilation of the Jewish people.

Yet none of this, that is, none of the reality of the Holocaust suffered by European Jews, excuses what has happened to the Palestinian people in the period since World War II, and especially since May 1948. And it is this that many people, in what is colloquially known as “Black America,” understand so well. The Israeli apartheid system that expropriates land from the Palestinians; restricts mixed marriages; condemns Palestinians to separate AND inferior education; and repudiates their internationally recognized right to return to their land and their homes, simply carries with it the same stench of the decadent and oppressive system that we came to know here in the USA as Jim Crow segregation.

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December 3rd, 2009 @ 7:59pm by Guest

On November 19th, President Barack Obama wrote a stirring tribute in USA Today to the most famous draft resister in US history, Muhammad Ali. On Tuesday, Obama spoke at West Point, calling for an increase of 30,000 troops into Afghanistan, with a speech that recalled the worst shadings of George W. Bush’s “war on terror.”

On November 19th, Obama wrote about why Ali’s photo hangs over his desk, praising “The Greatest” for “his unique ability to summon extraordinary strength and courage in the face of adversity, to navigate the storm and never lose his way.” On Tuesday, Obama showed neither courage nor strength but the worst kind of imperial arrogance. He asserted America’s right to go into a deeply impoverished country that - from Alexander the Great to the USSR to today - has made clear to the world’s empires that it wants to be left the hell alone.

On Tuesday, Obama summoned the spectre of 9/11 and said, “It is easy to forget that when this war began, we were united–bound together by the fresh memory of a horrific attack, and by the determination to defend our homeland and the values we hold dear.” He didn’t mention how many innocent Afghans had already died in eight years of “horrific attacks” on their homeland or how many would die in the months ahead, defending their own homeland.

On November 19th, Obama praised Ali as “a force for reconciliation and peace around the world.” On Tuesday the Nobel Peace Prize winner, reconciled himself with war.

Would that Muhammad Ali still had his voice. Would that Parkinson’s disease and dementia had not robbed us of his razor-sharp tongue.

Today, Ali has been described as “America’s only living saint.” But like Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, both postage stamps before people, Ali has had his political teeth extracted.

But in a time when billions go to war and prisons while 50% of children will be on food stamps for the coming year, we can’t afford Ali, the harmless icon. Maybe Muhammad Ali has been robbed of speech, but I think we can safely guess what the Champ would say in the face of Obama’s war. We can safely guess, because he said it perfectly four decades ago:

“Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights? No, I’m not going 10,000 miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over. This is the day when such evils must come to an end. I have been warned that to take such a stand would cost me millions of dollars. But I have said it once and I will say it again. The real enemy of my people is here….. If I thought the war was going to bring freedom and equality to 22 million of my people, they wouldn’t have to draft me, I’d join tomorrow. I have nothing to lose by standing up for my beliefs. So I’ll go to jail, so what? We’ve been in jail for 400 years.”

Replace Vietnam with Afghanistan and it’s a message Barack Obama and our troops need to hear. But we shouldn’t wait for some celebrity or athlete to make that statement for us. Muhammad Ali may have helped shape the 1960s, but those years of resistance also shaped him. We need to rebuild the movement against war. We need to revive the real Muhammad Ali to inspire draft resistors of the future. We need to reclaim Ali from warmongers who would use his image to sell a war that will create more orphans than peace. This is the struggle of our lives and we have the Nobel-minted President of the United States on the other side of the barricades. Barack Obama can have the fawning media, the oadring generals, the RNC, and the liberal apologists on his side.

But he can’t have the Champ. Remove that poster from your wall Mr. President. Your Ali privileges have been revoked.

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October 28th, 2009 @ 2:10pm by Guest

I just received a letter from President Obama. Right there on the outside envelope are the words “I need you.” After not answering several letters which I have mailed and faxed to him, I was, for the briefest of moments, curious about this personal plea for help. Then, of course, I realized that it was a form letter from Mr. Obama via the auspices of the Democratic National Committee DNC.

I started reading the two page, single-spaced missive. His words prompt responses.

He opens with undeniable declarations, to wit: “There are times in the life of our nation when America’s course can only be set by the concerted effort of citizens determined to pull our country through.

This is one of those times—and your personal involvement in moving America forward is absolutely essential.”

Just what this “personal involvement” is all about is unclear, other than to make a “contribution of $25, $35 or even $50 to the Democratic National Committee” which is somehow supposed to make sure that “America’s families are actively engaged in the critical decisions that lie ahead.”

This money will fund something called “Organizing for America” under the DNC which will unleash “volunteers and activists” to “carry our message…all across this great country of ours.”

The “message” includes “reforms that will bring down the cost of health insurance for families.” But Mr. Obama has taken the one reform—single payer, which he used to support—off the table and replaced it with a bill over a 1000 pages that will do just the opposite—to the delight of the drug and health insurance industries (see singlepayeraction.org).

Continuing into the letter, Mr. Obama emphasizes that “in communities all across America, people are worried about whether they’re going to have a job and paycheck to count on.”

But he has done nothing to support the card check reform to facilitate workers forming unions—an objective he supported during his presidential campaign. Still no push on Congress, no ringing statement of support, as he has uttered numerous times in promoting his various bailouts of Big Business.

One way to help low income workers to pay their bills is to elevate the federal minimum wage to $10 an hour which is what the minimum wage was in 1968, adjusted for inflation. The federal minimum wage is now $7.25. Adding $2.75 per hour would increase consumer demand in our faltering real economy.

The Democrats and Republicans, who gave bailouts in the trillions of dollars for the paper economy of the mismanaged, speculating, reckless big banks, big investment firms and insurance giants like AIG, should provide some economic assistance to workers on Main Street and not just Wall Street.

Mr. Obama writes: “Let’s put America’s future in the hands of people who are willing to work hard, willing to take their responsibilities seriously….” Perhaps Mr. Obama should read the short book by one of his Harvard Law School professors, Richard Parker, titled Here the People Rule. Professor Parker makes a strong case that the government has a constitutional duty to facilitate the political and civic energies of the people.

An important pathway toward this objective is to provide facilities whereby the people can easily band together in their nonprofit civic advocacy associations which they would fund themselves. Mr. Obama can start this process now by supporting a provision to establish a financial consumer association (FCA) with the pending legislation to start a consumer financial regulatory agency.

Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) supported a Financial Consumer Association in 1985 when he was in the House of Representatives. Remember the savings and loan bailouts?

A similar provision can be included in the pending health insurance legislation. These facilities help to redress the present severe imbalance of power between the unorganized people and the corporate power machines which are often taxpayer subsidized and able to deduct lobbying expenses.

These consumer facilities have some precedents. In Obama’s home state of Illinois thousands of consumers of electric, telephone and gas companies voluntarily pay their membership dues to their private advocacy group: Illinois CUB (see http://www.citizensutilityboard.org).

He asks for our “personal participation.” Well why doesn’t he meet with the leaders of consumer, worker and poverty groups in the White House with the frequency with which he meets with the CEOs of giant corporations in the banking, insurance (Aetna), oil, gas, coal, auto and other commercial interests?

Instead he has turned his back on the very constituencies which gave him most of his votes. These are the people who remember Mr. Obama’s campaign promises and all his intonations of “hope and change,” including moving to reform the privileged tax laws for the rich and corporations and revising the notorious trade agreements.

Since Mr. Obama wants “personal participation,” how about moving for D.C. statehood or at least his expressed desire for voting rights and Congressional representation for the residents of the nation’s capital? As the months drag on with a Democratic Congress and a Democratic White House, people are losing hope for any change in their present state of political servitude.

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October 28th, 2009 @ 9:13am by D.C.

As most of you probably know you should get the H1N1 vaccination. And as most of your probably know you shouldn’t get the H1N1 vaccination. Kind of confusing isn’t it? At least I think so. While I think doctors and healthcare professionals can provide us with useful information on what a person should do, I say this as a generalization. I point this out because I have come across an “Opinion” in the Globe and Mail written by Juliet Guichon and Ian Mitchell. Guichon has a L.L.D., and works in the Office of Medical Bioethics at the University of Calgary (UofC). Mitchell on the other hand is a professor of pediatrics and bioethics at UofC.

These two professionals present an article that is pure opinion.In their article I find three things quite disturbing:

1) When I first read the article I did not like the idea of fear-mongering people into getting the H1N1 vaccination.They state, and I quote:

Mass H1N1 vaccination refusal similarly might destroy (at least temporarily) our health-care system, with the threatened 100,000 people in hospital.

Might destroy our healthcare system! Really? Well, although I agree that H1N1 is very serious and it is important to be informed, people should be free to make their own decisions. Like many people have argued, the seasonal flu kills many people each year, but the popular media has chosen to focus on the H1N1 related deaths to the point that this all that gets reported. We don’t get to hear about the hundreds of people that die from other strains of the flu because media has become saturated with H1N1.

2) The second point I find distressing is their comparison to the cod stocks crisis that closed the fishery on the Atlantic coast in the early 1990s. While the article insinuates that Atlantic fishermen were unable to recognize that their overfishing was destroying codstocks, this is simply not the case. Fishermen in Newfoundland for instance, were cognizant of the environmental effects of the fishery as early as the 1900s. Fishing off the coasts had been going on for hundreds of years, so it is not as ’spur of the moment’ as Guichon and Mitchell make it seem. What were fishermen to do? Were they to lay down their livelihoods overnight and give up fishing? It is not an easy thing to answer. It may have helped the codstocks, but then again it might not have. Even today, with the fishery being regulated the codstocks aren’t back up to normal. So on this comparison, I give them a big thumbs down. People face just as hard a decision over whether to get the vaccine or not as the fishermen did in the 1990s.

3) My last point is to argue against one of their last statements:Moreover, lay people can be confused by publicly available scientific information because they don’t understand the scientific method or conversations scientists have among themselvesOh, I’m sorry I guess just because I’m not a doctor I will be easily confused by jargon and acronyms. I have found that the general public, when given the right circumstances to understand something are not as “lay” or dumb as some people like to think they are. If you break the largest, most complicated problem down, it becomes composed of commonsense problems. Give people enough time and energy and they can produce a commonsense answer to a problem (this is in general I might add, there are always extreme cases). We, as non-medically educated people may not be scientists, but I am pretty sure they are using a language of some sort which people have experience with. They may not initially be able to comprehend complex concepts, but they can discern what is important and what is not. ALSO, if Guichon and Mitchell believe the “lay people” to be so misinformed it might have been very helpful for them to actually address some of those issues more explicitly, rather than labeling people that do not get vaccinated as destroyers of healthcare.

People are able to make their own informed opinions, and they should not be guilted into something by either the mass media, government or professionals that present a one-sided opinion. H1N1 may be quite serious, but it still does not change ones individual rights to choose the best course of action for themselves.