Actors are often not the best personalities to help us frame social issues. I don't know why this seems so, but whether it be a conservative Mel Gibson or a liberal Susan Sarandon or the irony of ironies of a life-long dope addict like Liz Taylor stomping for AIDS money, Hollywood, like its movies, can only deal best with the shallowest aspect of our world. British actress, Glenda Jackson, found the best remedy for this simplicity was to give up acting and join a socialist political party, where she today sits in Parliament. Angelina Jolie, whom I would like to play Wonder Woman if Hollywood would tire of re-makes of Superman, is stomping for the world's refugees. She herself orchestrated an interview on CNN. She has also made a name for herself adopting Third World children. And true to Hollywood form, we are getting a global pandemic framed in the most narrow way, which limits the questions we ask and the solutions we propose.
This is not Jolie's fault. The UN has a World Refugee Day. It does not have a World Dispossessed of Land Day. The UN has a Children's Fund. It does not have an agency for parents. Paulo Freire began his literacy lessons with the words "The Land belongs to the tiller." Jolie needs a lesson from the Brazilian educator, Freire.
So in light of our attention being drawn to the sorrowful plight of refugees and the needs of babies in need of food, water, and love I would like to pose some fundamental questions outside the range book-ended with dire need and Jolie herself.
[1] If these are Refugees, why aren't we asking where their homes are, their lands, their farms?
[2] Where are the parents of these orphans, and if they are no longer on this earth, where are the grandparents, aunts, uncles?
Where is the land? Some farm land in the Third World has become unfarmable. This is due to a combination of really bad colonial farming practices imposed for decades upon decades by imperial powers to extract as much wealth as fast as possible without regard to the health of the soil.
Bad land is also due to bad farming by peasant farmers themselves. You might argue they learned these worst practices from their Masters, but who knows: you can't write a law and make bad clay into good soil, so there's no use crying over that split milk.
But much of the land of the dispossessed has been confiscated by Third World governments beholden to Western Capital. They have debts to pay or they want financing, and this comes with Strings, and the Strings are to sell this, sell that, end government ownership of public utilities and allow private, Western companies to take them. And these Third World governments have used their militaries and their thugs to drive people off susbsistence farmlands to sell the rights to that land for global purposes.
Enter your refugees, framed narrowly by the camps on one side and Angelina Jolie on the other.
Orphans are just the middle step child of the Refugee Crisis. While you certainly can pinpoint cases of whole families being wiped out save a baby, these cases are the exception. What is happening is that these families - be they mother and/or father and/or grandparents - simply cannot afford another mouth to feed, since their land has been taken and they are dispersed hither and yonder in various encampments across the former colonial world. Their water rights privatized and sold to Western interests. They are no longer just poor, they are destitute, and a murderous band of thugs is at their heels driving them away from their real estate. Look at Sudan.
Look at MEXICO. The Mexican government and ruling class removed the land rights citation from the Mexican Constitution in the 1980's. Pres. Salinas signed it. It was this action that sparked the organization of the Zapatista Movement. It also drove subsistent, poorly educated farm people off their land, into the cities, where they faired no better, and eventually into the streets of the US, where they now ask for RIGHTS.
Refugees do not come from the Heavens. They come from political decisions. These aren't Refugee Crises or Orphans at all, but people being starved from the source of their lives, people who are being dropped further down the scale of the Capitalist Food Chain.
Ambassador Jolie's advocacy for them, her pleas for money, does not end that Food Chain or raise their place on it. Oscar Wilde once said you cannot end poverty by keeping the poor alive; just so, why are we fundraising to keep these desert camps operating, by definition based in areas that are unfarmable and unsaleable.
So we are evolving into a system where Poor Farmers have no land to sow, Third World women can no longer care for their babies, where Third World families cannot even give the basics, not because of some Natural Disaster but because of a Man-made one.
And Betchel's stock rises as it secures even the rights to RAIN WATER in South America!
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