Harbingers — a long commentary

Sometimes a single experience can produce a cluster of realizations.

On a recent trip to Haiti, in Cap Haitien and Port-au-Prince, I witnessed people constantly in motion. Narrow streets, mostly dirt, only one marked in a city of two million, all impossibly crowded with traffic. How anyone navigated and survived a venture into those streets confounded me. Children darted in and out of a flow of pedestrians who filled what might have been shoulders if roads there had such. Into that same space crowded scooters and small motorcycles with whole families aboard, bicycles, delivery trucks, buses filled to overflowing with people and livestock covering the roofs, tap-taps also brimming with life, cars, trucks, pickups, white UN military vehicles. Only one traffic law seemed to apply: When someone honks, pay attention.

The sides of the road brought more culture shock. Trash was piled everywhere space existed between houses. People combed through the mess, looking for bits of metal. Atop the mounds of trash, pigs and chickens were tethered, picking away at bits of food and I shudder to imagine what else they found there to eat. Alongside the streets, between houses, ran concrete gutters or trenches dug into the dirt. They flowed into the bays or just disappeared into the streets. This I realized was the sewer "system." I never saw what passed for a water system, but there might have been such, at least something that connected to businesses and wealthy homes. Even in those places, we could not drink the water and I had to think hard about bathing in it, remembering to keep my eyes and mouth closed.

Along sidewalks and what would have been sidewalks if they had been there, were vendors and even industry. Those who had gleaned metal or wire sold it from the side of the road. There they set up little shops to crack open motors, extract the tiniest pieces of wire and splice them together to make coils. Next door, others spent the day hammering out bent bicycle rims and chains and selling them. With so much traffic and so few consumer goods, there's a big market in bicycle and other vehicle repair. These people are industrious to the max. In every possible space, men and women crouch beside tiny markets selling items like fake Crocs, stale cheese and crackers, cookies and water packets. Movement everywhere. Use, reuse everything.

Dust traffic kicks up traveled into houses built right up to the edges of streets. A peek into doorways brought views of women fighting the endless battle of sweeping the dust back into the street. Those with homes to sweep out had precious little else, and hearing the stories behind the snapshots of life we could see revealed some true horrors. That dust, that dust that came off the tires of trucks, off the feet of livestock living on trash heaps, that mixed with soot from ever-present charcoal fires and the overflowing sewers became "food" for human beings at the bottom of the heap. The women who swept the dust from their homes resorted to mixing it with sugar and oil and baking it into cookies to staunch the burning hunger in their children's bellies.

As the meaning of what I was seeing settled into my brain, I realized I was looking at a preview of our future if we don't' make some big changes fast. Two qualities missing from Haiti are rapidly declining here: Infrastructure and a middle class.

United States' policy and industry are largely responsible for what exists and does not exist in Haiti. Fifty or more years of meddling in their politics and imposing our markets on them have made them dependent on others for everything new and extra in their lives, and most of the basics. Once cheap American food came into their country, the farmers could not compete and left their farms for the city where they found no work. Now there are not enough farmers left to grow sufficient food to feed the people of Haiti and they must buy everything imported. A small island, they don't have raw materials to produce many consumer goods, so all those things are imported as well. European colonials clear-cut their great mahogany forests. Having no fossil fuels on the island, the people have nearly completed the deforestation to make charcoal for their traditional cook stoves. Corrupt governments have left the streets, water and sewer treatment to fall into ruin. Each failing resource makes recovery from another less likely. And as soon as world fuel prices soared, the cost of almost everything zoomed out of the reach of almost everyone in Haiti, including the few wealthy because the retailers couldn't afford to buy their supplies.

Isn't that a complete metaphor for the position we find ourselves in today in these United States? We no longer make things, we import them. Industrial giants have forced out the family farmers and replaced food crops with fuel crops. We are spoiling our environment to cook our food and heat our homes. Our infrastructure is falling into ruin — bridges, roads, levees, rail beds no longer are serviceable. Our people, no longer employed to make things, fall ever more often into low-paying service and retail work. Our common investment through tax dollars does not address these issues. So far, the political conversations only touch on the urgent need to attend to maintaining a middle class and the infrastructure that made this country the mightiest on earth. Our so-called solutions are pitifully shallow, narrow, shortranged and insufficient.

So think about that as your considering whom to vote for in the upcoming elections. Is there a vision and an action plan to create a future for America that strengthens the systems that are vital to our independence and our common well-being? Barack Obama is beginning to outline such a plan. But he needs support from a broad spectrum of folks to enlarge that vision. And he needs people elected at all levels of government who care more about making hard choices and honestly communicating what kinds of sacrifices we need to make now to ensure the future than they are in re-election. We really must get beyond the reality show mentality, the game that we have made of politics and seriously assess how we direct our common resources for the common good. Otherwise, we will be engaged in that daily struggle Haitians live to just stay alive.