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Ever since the tragedy of
September 11, 2001, there has been a fairly
constant refrain heard in
the United States. Americans, who once thought their country
invulnerable, their culture beyond reproach and their global image
impeccable, are asking, “Why do they hate us?” Human emotion being
what it is, there is no single or simple answer to that question. They
hate us for a number of reasons, some illogical, but some very
understandable. And, while hatred is never productive, never defensible,
its causes should never be ignored because its consequences can be
catastrophic.
One of the
things I hear Americans say they hate about us is our freedom. I
would have to agree. There are those in the rest of the world who are as
offended by our freedoms as are we by their despotism. They hate the fact
that we have freedom of religion, that we have freedom of speech, that our
women are becoming increasingly free to determine their own destinies.
They believe that all these freedoms are an offense against all that is
decent and holy. I believe they are wrong. It is because of our freedom
that I am able to write what I write, however controversial, however
offensive to some. It is because of our freedom that my family moved to
the United States in 1960. We left South Africa when the white government
there was stripping the people, both white and black, of their freedom to
speak out against injustice, to live wherever and with whom ever they
chose. We left because it was life threatening to question the
government’s policy of apartheid.
Of course, some
of them hate us because they are simply jealous of our privileges,
our freedoms, our wealth. They envy us these things, and they want what
we have. That, surely, is understandable, in light of the conditions
under which so many of the people across the world live. However, many
Americans, perhaps most, do not have any idea what these conditions are.
And here, perhaps, we are coming to the crux of why they hate us.
Many of us, in this country of free public education, of free press, of
wealth and privilege, of immense (but not inexhaustible) natural
resources, are abysmally ignorant about the rest of the world, and too
many are willfully, smugly, intractably, even belligerently so.
What has
inspired this diatribe is a 60 Minutes TV newsmagazine segment I
watched last week. It included, you knew it would have to, information
about American dealings with South Africa. The report actually began by
describing the shortage of nurses in the United States, and the reasons
for the shortage. It described the conditions that have reduced the
numbers of nurses, forcing those who are still in the profession to work
long, grueling hours. American nurses, simply put, are underpaid and
undervalued. Their wages have not even increased with the cost of
living. The nurses who are still on the job are getting older, and
because of the lack of incentives to enter the field, young people are not
going into nursing. We have a desperate shortage, and it will only get
worse.
But measures are
being taken to remedy the situation. Corporations have formed for the
sole purpose of recruiting qualified nurses from other English speaking
countries around the world. And guess which country is one of these? You
got it: South Africa. Apparently South African nurses, both black and
white, are among the best trained, most experienced nurses in the world.
But they are working in a country that is struggling to overcome the
terrible social problems created by apartheid now that it (apartheid) has
been abolished. Most of these nurses make only $5,000 a year, not enough
for them to feed their families on. What America has to offer them must
seem like vast wealth, especially when free plane fare, guaranteed green
cards for themselves and their families, housing assistance, and insurance
benefits are part of the package. Many of these nurses are inevitably
leaving South Africa.
And why
shouldn’t they? Do they not deserve opportunities? Well, as one of the
interviewees on 60 Minutes said, while it is understandable that
these nurses would come to the United States, and while they do deserve
opportunities, the practice of recruiting them is simply unethical. I
would add it is an example of why they hate us. It is an example
of our American belief that we are entitled to anything we can buy, simply
because we have the resources to do so.
There is, of
course, a history here that leads me to this conclusion. America, God
bless her, imposed sanctions on South Africa in order to bring the white
government there to its knees and to force its members to abolish
apartheid. What was wrong with that? Well, on the surface, nothing. It
was, however, typical of our rather half-assed, poorly thought-through
tactics. The sanctions did have their effect. In 1983, when my family
and I visited South Africa, the average white person drove a Mercedes or a
BMW or an Alpha-Romeo. The disparity in wealth between white and black
was glaring. In 1990, when my husband and I visited again, there had been
a dramatic change. But, rather than the wealth having been spread around
so that conditions for blacks had improved, conditions for them had become
increasingly desperate. Whites, too, had been affected, but only to the
extent that they had been forced to substitute Mazdas for Mercedes. Many
white professionals, in fact, had left the country, taking their money
with them. In other words, the people who were most hurt by the sanctions
were the blacks, not the whites. As I said, God bless America and her
bloody liberals.
Finally, the
sanctions did topple apartheid, but, as F. W. De Klerk, the white South
African Prime Minister whose statesmanship, along with that of Nelson
Mandela’s, made the transition a smoother and less bloody one than any
other in Africa, said, America imposed sanctions, forced the country to
change, and then simply walked away, giving no thought to what was to
happen next, giving no financial aid to a country that needed (and still
needs) help to rebuild itself. One of the consequences of apartheid
was an uneducated black population, almost completely unprepared to assume
the reins of government. Because of the sanctions, professional white
people, the very people who had the means to rebuild the country, had
left, taking their wealth and expertise with them. They were leaving,
almost literally, in droves. (At one point, 2,000 professionals
a month were leaving the country.)
Where there is
economic despair, of course, there is crime, and not just crime, but angry
crime, violent crime. There is an epidemic of violent crime in South
Africa, not simply black on white crime, but black on black crime. It is
brutal, it is mindless, it is horrifying, and there is no way of knowing
how or when it will end.
Where there
is lack of education, there is ignorance, and one of the consequences of
this ignorance in Africa is AIDS. South Africa has not been spared. It
is as much of an epidemic there as it is elsewhere on the continent. (My
cousin and her husband both work and the University of Port Elizabeth; at
that university, 50% of the students are either HIV positive or
have AIDS, and this is typical of the population in general.)
Is the
United States helping South Africa economically or in any other way? Of
course not. The country is now on its own, left to work its problems out
alone. This is why recruiting nurses there is unethical. This
is why they hate us. This is a perfect example of our greed, our
sense of entitlement, our complete disregard for the consequences of our
imperialism and our shallow thinking. Not only do we not help a country
like South Africa to rebuild, we steal their brightest and best,
leaving them to their chaos and suffering. And we do it simply because we
can. We have the power, we have the wealth, and we believe we deserve to
do it. It is no different than what we have done to encourage sweatshops
in Asia and South America. We cannot induce our own people to work for
slave wages, so we go to countries where people are so desperate that they
will work for almost nothing, and we exploit their desperation. We
support corrupt regimes around the world simply because they can provide
us with goods and services we need; we pay no attention to how these
regimes treat their people, how these regimes exploit their countries and
their own people (as long as these regimes are not communist). We will not
pay our nurses decently, and because our young people will not buy into
our system, we steal nurses who are desperately needed in their own
countries and bring them here because it’s cheaper than doing the right
thing – giving economic aid to a country that needs it and paying our own
nurses decent wages. We did the same thing with teachers: we could not
find teachers to teach in our inner cities because American teachers, too,
are underpaid and undervalued, so where did we go to find teachers? You
got it again: South Africa.
Meanwhile,
we build our Disney Lands and Disney Worlds; we buy our “cool” cars; we
use up our natural resources and those of the rest of the world; we drink
our Starbucks coffee in our air-conditioned cafes; we live in gated
communities or flee our inner cities to escape from urban crime and
desperation, and we say “Why not? We deserve it. We earned it.” Well, we
didn’t. We are simply incredibly lucky to have been born (or to have been
able to move to) a country that hasn’t been used up yet. Too many of us
are completely ignorant of and indifferent to the plight of our own poor
and the poor and desperate in other in other parts of the world, many of
whom have been devastatingly impacted by our shortsightedness, our greed,
our imperialism.
And we are
an empire. Call us what you like, we are an empire. We would do well to
remember that empires such as ours never survive. None of
the great empires of the world, from the Roman to the British, survived.
They all crumbled under the weight of their self-satisfaction,
their arrogance, their sense of entitlement, their greed, their
corruption. One way or another, they were toppled, either from within
because of the hatred of those who had been marginalized, or from without
because of the hatred of those who had been exploited and discarded.
The trouble
is, of course, that we, in our infinite wisdom, have now created the
where-with-all for them to not only destroy us and each other, but
the entire planet. Ours may be the last empire because ours was the one
that initiated the nuclear age. There may never again be an “us and
them,” and it will be our own fault. We have had the lessons of history
to examine; we have the material security that makes it possible for
people to become reflective because they are not simply struggling to
survive. The answers are all there as to why they hate us, why
they want to destroy us, but we are lost in our self-pity, our
rhetoric of revenge against “evil-doers,” and, worst of all, our militant
denial of our sins.
By the end
of the day on September 11, I thought to myself, “If you have, and you do
not share, if you have because you have stolen from others, if you have
and you do not care that others do not, eventually those you have hurt
will either take what you have from you, or they will destroy you, even
if, in the process, they destroy themselves.” I pray I am wrong.
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