Want to Buy Some DDT?
Published by marco on
Little Nicky Kristof Bugs Out by Mickey Z (CounterPunch) offers another lession in identifying the underlying problem instead of being satisfied with having offered a solution for a symptom.
It may be unfair to pick on Nicholas Kristoff, of the New York Times, since he often offers only shallow interpretations of issues for his reading public. He’s still employed, so he must be doing something right. He still calls himself a journalist, so he’s fair game. In response to the massive need that became impossible to ignore because it became a news event, he offered the following solution:
“If the U.S. wants to help people in tsunami-hit countries like Sri Lanka and Indonesia − not to mention other poor countries in Africa − there’s one step that would cost us nothing and would save hundreds of thousands of lives. It would be to allow DDT in malaria-ravaged countries.”
If we want to nitpick (and if you’ve been reading … we do.), you’d note that “if the U.S. wants to …” is an interesting way to start the sentence. Maybe it’s just absent-mindedness; an ingrained way of writing that’s just trying to hit a word count rather than make a point. I’d think that a quick re-read would have resulted in editing that sentence. I would have written “In order for the U.S. to …”. Just the assumption that a country with a ridiculous amount of wealth like ours can already consider itself a hero just for even thinking about sending aid; that a big pat on the back has already been earned just for noticing.
Kristoff bends his considerable journalistic acumen to seeing the problem behind the problem: “[m]osquitoes kill 20 times more people each year than the tsunami did”. He advocates allowing the use of DDT in those countries, because its carcinogenic effects have not been proven (in the same way that global warming hasn’t been proven). Now, this may sound like an insightful bit of reasoning, a real “thinking outside of the box” approach to a hard problem that will accept a few victims if so many others can be saved.
Cool. Let’s do that. Help the savages make the hard choices they won’t make for themselves. Disburse ourselves of that centuries-old white man’s burden. It’s a solution! Let’s go for it!
That’s the biggest problem we face in discourse today. There is definite, identifiable, real problem. Someone pipes up with a plan that s/he claims will solve this problem. Immediately, you are in two camps:
- You are for that solution (whether it solves the problem or not)
- You don’t think the solution addresses the problem or think that there is a better solution
In modern American discourse, people in camp (2) are told that they “don’t care about the problem” and can now be ignored. Mickey Z is apparently used to being in this camp; he offers a sensible, reasoned argument why giving DDT to the third world doesn’t solve the real problem facing them.
“If more people in more countries had access to basics-like, say, clean water and a living wage-the conditions those people would live in would not be conducive to preventable deaths. If more people were not subject to the whims of corrupt leaders, World Bank policies, corporate imperialism, and oblivious Westerners, they’d not be in the position to have to deal with malaria-carrying mosquitoes…or tsunamis that arrive without warning, for that matter. If you want “one step that would cost us nothing and would save hundreds of thousands of lives,” here it is: Wake Up, Asshole.”
I happen to think that’s an excellent point, but I also am a more-or-less permanent resident of camp (2). The way to prevent third world deaths is not to toss them a bone every once in a while; it is to treat them as more than a place to which we sell things or from which we obtain cheap labor and products. It is to shuck off the white man’s burden and begin to act like the moral creatures we always purport to be whenever anyone asks. It is to put away the guns and take a long and hard look at the distribution of wealth in the world and wonder about its long term consequences.