By Donald H. Harrison

SAN DIEGO, Calif. —All of us have our ways of looking at the world, and sometimes, I suppose, we become so used to the neat mental maps that we draw for ourselves that we become oblivious to what else might be out there.  Wasn't that the case during the Cold War, when we in the United States divided the world into the us (western democracies) and the them (the communist nations)?  

In picturing the world that way, we failed to take into account the rising nationalism in the Third World. Instead of thinking of North Vietnam and its allies in South Vietnam as a people who were trying to overcome their colonial legacy, perhaps misguidedly,  via state socialism, we saw them as part of an unfolding effort by the communist nations to take over the world. So, of course we resisted.

Today, Washington sees the world through a different set of lenses.  Now, apparently, the world is divided into countries like the U.S.—which love freedom and peace — and stateless "terrorists" and their state supporters who fear freedom.   It's interesting, isn't it, that the initials of our country—U.S.—can be read "us" reinforcing the corresponding concept of a "them."?  What's harder than nailing water to the wall is figuring out just why they—those other guys—"hate" freedom and democracy.  Do people really "hate" such things, or do they "hate" something else?

Let me leave aside that thought, for the moment, so I can make the point that political myopia isn't simply a U.S. problem; other countries and people suffer from their own versions of the affliction.   Surely the Protestants in Northern Ireland who thought the Catholics were the problem, and vice versa, were beset with a form of it.  The Serbs and the Croats in the former Yugoslav Republic had it bad.  The Tutsis and the Hutus in Rwanda  put into clear perspective for us what can come of such thinking.  

We American Jews have not been immune from the affliction, not at all.  Don't we tend to divide our world into two great conflicts; the one in the Middle East, where opposing forces want to make the entire territory Islamic, and the culture conflict here in the United States, where we feel forced to  politically resist those who want to turn the whole country into a Christian empire?

I'm not suggesting that the struggle to remain territorially independent in the Middle East or religiously independent here in the United States are not important causes. They are, and I am dedicated to them.  I just want to caution that we can't be so consumed by those conflicts that we become oblivious to other developments in the world.  We cannot fail to understand that colossal competitions between populations of much greater size may someday dwarf our struggles into increasingly  irrelevant sidelights..  

I listened to urban historian Mike Davis, author of Planet of Slums, speak tonight at the First Unitarian Universalist Church in the Hillcrest area of San Diego about a problem that few people have conceptualized with the clarity that I heard him bring to the subject.  Today over 50 percent of  the more than 6.6 billion people who share the world with us live in cities.  And of these 3.3 billion, as many as 1 billion people—one-sixth of humanity— live in slums, places which Davis defines as having substandard housing, insecurity of tenure, and below-standard sanitation, electricity and water.

Slums throughout the world have gone through some fundamental changes, Davis told us. Free land for squatters has all but disappeared.  Today, if the poor want a place to throw up a cardboard shack, they will have to rent that land from someone—the government, a private landowner, or the group that got their shanties their first.  Crowded even out of the slums, an increasing number of poor have become homeless.  They live, sleep, eat, defecate, on the streets. About the only times when this process doesn't occur is when the poor move onto unclaimed land that is far too physically dangerous—in arroyos subject to flash flooding; on the sides of  too-steep cliffs, in toxic dumps or sewers. 

Whether in  their dwellings, or on the streets, the poor of the slums are not finding factory jobs, not even in sweat shops. Instead they are trying to exist on the margins, as participants in the "informal economy."  They rent or lash together a rickshaw, and hope to scratch out a living.  They try to sell recycled goods from pushcarts.  Their women and children often are exploited.  Some literally steal to eat.  A city can absorb only so many rickshaws, so many pushcarts.  Soon competition breaks out between those trying to earn their livings..  That's when sectarian differences can come into play.  Do you don't speak our language?  No pushcart for you.  You don't follow our religion?  Get out of the rickshaw business.

Instead of sponsoring large-scale public housing projects, or creating factories where people can find sustaining  work, such entities as the World Bank have opted out of attempting to alleviate the suffering of the slum dwellers, according to Davis. Palliatives like micro-loans to create micro-industries provide opportunities for a very few, but these do not keep up even with natural population increases. Davis said  it is as if someone has conducted a moral triage, to decide who gets to survive and who doesn't, and the ever increasing number of slum dwellers didn't make the cut.

The United Nations sponsored a conference in Vancouver on the world's urban areas last June.  The conference didn't receive very much attention from such media as the Los Angeles Times or the New York Times, perhaps because great newspapers also suffer from myopia.  What happens when people from rural areas continue to move to urban areas—to slums, like Sadr City in Baghdad—only to find there are no avenues  to economic betterment?  Davis suggests these slums become the war training camps of the future.  They will become the places where government helicopters go on search and destroy missions, and where the slum people will reply with car bombs.  "Slum people will not go quietly into the night imagined for them," Davis warned. "They are not going to go away."

Davis does not reduce al-Qaeda into a manifestation of the distress felt in the slums--its leaders after all were drawn from the Arab middle and upper income brackets. However, he suggested that the slums will become a major area for conflict.  They are "full of people who will not accept the fact that they have been excluded from humanity," Davis warned.

So what is to do about it? the author was asked.  He responded with a call for world-wide programs to make cities more livable and to "allow us to live justly and equitably with each other."  That's a better use for massive spending programs  than military armaments.  Furthermore, urged Davis, Americans must emerge from their "bubble of privilege" and  reject the idea that a part of humanity can be consigned to lives without futures.  "When you refuse to accept this, then you are fighting on the right side."


That we live in the bubble of privilege, while they have no place to live at all; that's what people hate." "Freedom," "democracy," sound interesting, but what relevance do they really have for people in such desperate straits?

More than the prospect of an uprising by one-sixth the world's population, Davis said he fears the "reflex of people living inside the bubble."  He said he is scared there will be "utter barbarism in defense of their privilege."

Davis ended his presentation inside the Universalist Unitarian Church with an appeal for his audience to "maintain our moral vigil," whether guided by the socialism which he espouses, or by traditional Judaism or Christianity.   

Through various tzedakah and tikkun olam projects—such as the members of Congregation Beth Israel  regularly volunteering to feed the homeless people at St. Vincent de Paul, or the members of Temple Emanu-El who provide a shelter in their synagogue for  homeless people over the winter holidays—it is true that our local Jewish community does engage these kinds of issues.  

But, let's be honest, as a community,  the problems of the urban poor—here in San Diego, across the border in Tijuana, and throughout the world—simply have not permeated our consciousnesses.  We don't see how all this affects us.  How soon will it be before someone bursts that bubble?