Flashes of Panic

Back in May, I posted an opinionated little bit about the so-called “economic stimulus checks” we’re being sent by the Federal Government in an effort to jump-start consumer spending and thereby re-start economic growth. Mine arrived in June, when I was busy getting ready to go to Eugene, so I deposited it and promised myself I’d figure out what to do with the money later.

In Eugene, I read Tracy Kidder’s Mountains Beyond Mountains, which is subtitled, “The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World”. It’s a remarkable book, in that Kidder, who is often nearly invisible in his books, is much more of a character in this one, and he plays us, everyone who reads of the fantastic efforts of Farmer and feels perhaps a little smaller in comparison.

Farmer’s motivation is, perhaps reductively, simply this: people are dying of curable diseases. Not only do they not need to die, but if they weren’t so poor, they might not be vulnerable to these diseases (AIDS, tuberculosis, etc.) in the first place. And finally, they are often poor as a direct result of this country’s foreign policies (e.g. Haiti).

Farmer’s organization, Partners In Health, takes on these public health issues around the world, addressing them primarily because they are addressable—because they don’t view resignation in the face of overwhelming odds an appropriate response—but it also happens that addressing pandemics like multi-drug resistant tuberculosis and AIDS immediately, even in poor communities (or, in the case of MDR TB, in the prisons of Russia) is significantly less expensive than it will be to address them once they break free of those environments and simply start sweeping the world at large.

I can’t hope to find the dedication Farmer has to his cause, but it does make me angry that my government can find $600 to mail to hundreds of thousands of taxpayers to buy more gasoline, and billions upon billions of dollars to fund an unnecessary war in Iraq, but it can’t spare a few million to cure MDR TB in Haiti, or even attempt to address the health needs of its own poorest citizens.

So I’ve taken the $600 the government sent me and forwarded it on to Partners In Health. I think they’ll do better things with it than I would, and certainly they’ll do better than the government has.