"To a fish, the water is invisible."

A year or two ago I took a class with Dr. Rita Geier that examined four different cultures and how they treated different life events. At the beginning of the class, we were tasked with defining ourselves as cultural beings. Interestingly, when it came time to share how we described ourselves we saw two outcomes:

1) People enlisted words such as funny, studious, etc. to describe themselves. But they were doing just that—describing themselves and their personality, not their culture.

2) A minimal, incomplete description consisting of one or two words. I fell into this group. I knew funny didn’t describe a culture…but what did?

Later in the class, a professor from Switzerland helped us to understand and describe our culture. It was interesting that an “outsider”, if you will, was much more able to identify our cultural characteristics thaN we were.

In Mary-Wynne Ashford’s essay “Toward a Culture of Peace” she discusses why it is hard to change culture. She implies that we are so immersed in our own culture that it is difficult to separate the culture and its values from other aspects of our lives. She illustrates this with an African proverb:

“To a fish, the water is invisible”

This immediately reminded me of my experience in Dr. Geier’s class. Our own culture was invisible to us. The Swiss professor helped us to grow a fuller understanding of our own culture. And truly, I recognized aspects of my cultural life that I had never pinpointed before.

When I and other colleagues go abroad we often wonder what our place in studying another culture is. This proverb, in combination with my experience in Dr. Geier’s class, clarifies our role a bit. Others, like we in our own culture, are fish in their own cultural waters. We because of our foreignness have the potential to notice aspects of other cultures that are just too obvious for the people to bother noticing, in general. An outside perspective can be beneficial once in a while.

A short war and health nugget that might hit closer to home

One of the adverse affects of war on health that I think about often is the diversion of resources—be it monetary or otherwise—to the war effort. Resources that could be spent on providing public services are used instead to build and/or purchase weapons and support military efforts. In the context of my general studies the narrative goes a little like this:

A corrupt government in the developing country of X is siphoning resources to use to its own ends, and the rebel militia group is stealing and looting from civilians. The government does not allot appropriate percentages of the national wealth to public services such as clean water, sanitation systems, public health services, or safe transportation. This leads to unhealthy living conditions and lack of access to health services.

To be succinct.

But I’d like to draw your attention to a disconcerting parallel you might have noticed in the news as of late—Health reform in the U.S. The current U.S. war effort is one of the main reasons our deficit is the leviathan it is today. I was first confronted with how pervasive the issue of the deficit was three years ago when I was in D.C. lobbying for Congress’s support of peace efforts in northern Uganda. Everyone’s go to reason for their inability to acquiesce our petitions—the deficit. Now, we are seeing Congress struggle with pushing through health reform efforts that work with the deficit. We’re a capitalist society. We know to start a new business you need capital. America has fondly taken healthcare to be a business, so it follows that to overhaul our current health system and start this “new business” we need significant capital.

Massive deficit due to war = minimal capital for health systems.

Although one might argue that the situation in the U.S. is completely different that in developing nation X, there are parallels. In the States, our money and resources have been diverted to the war effort, minimizing the resources remaining to be concentrated on public services such as healthcare. The same phenomenon I see in developing nation X.

Has a war taken place that has not had this effect on health, in any nation rich or poor?

Does Change.org membership reflect activists' priorities?

While browsing topics on Change.org, I noticed my pet, Global Health, had a comparatively low membership. After taking in all the memberships, I found Global Health actually boasts the second lowest membership of all 16 categories.

The lowest? Poverty in America

The highest? Animal Rights


Not that animals aren't important, but when it comes down to it, I'm going to have to say people are a bit more important.

Are there more oppressed animals in the U.S. than people? Or do today's activists just care more about animals than people? Or are animal rights easier to achieve than human rights?

There has been a surge of celebrity faced animal rights campaigns as of late. Why? Perhaps because it's a problem at which you actually can throw money and make it go away. Animals are easier to find homes for than are people. Animals cost less to feed. Animals need minimal healthcare. Animals are easier to love. No one accuses an animal for being homeless because it's lazy-- it's just cute.

I find this ranking rather alarming and find myself hoping this is not an accurate representation of today's activists. Hoping that someone in animal rights just had an incredibly effective campaign. Poverty is not just a phenomenon quarantined to developing areas. People in the United States die from poverty. Yet, according to the membership representation, this is the least important issue to Change.org's visitors with barely 20,000 members, while Animal Rights is going strong with over 67,000 members.

I'm glad people are making noise about important issues. All the issues represented by Change.org are important-- but some are arguably more important.

This isn't about animal rights, versus human rights. It rings to bigger issues: the conditioning of our society, who the leaders in advocacy are today, and what people do in the face of a difficult issue. Do they run to that which is "easy"?

Human rights are tough. They will not be easy. But that makes it that much more important.