WhirledView

The Refugee Crisis and the Drop in the Bucket Fallacy

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

The Greek island of Kos can’t accommodate all the refugees who land on its shores.  Nor can Greece alone deal with all those who turn up on its sea-washed territories.

Though incessantly berated for hard-heartedness, Europe, collectively, can’t absorb all the desperate, destitute refugees from the Middle East and Africa who wash ashore as regularly as the tides rise and fall.

Even the U.S. hasn’t enough money or space to rehabilitate all who flee impossibly dire, humanly intolerable situations.  

Emotional pleas and sermons on the virtues of charity are soul-wrenching, but they can’t alter the fact that there are upper limits to the absorptive ability of the comparatively wealthy, industrial countries of the world, none of which have completely recovered from the recent great recession. When balloons are filled with too much air, they burst. Countries ditto, when it comes to an influx of hundreds of thousands of refugees.

Why People Flee

What’s propelling people to leave well-loved homes in waves that represent a human catastrophe?  Wars, for one thing, including those waged through terrorism as well as by conventional means. Civil war.  Sectarian war.  Inter-religious war.  Ethnic war.  To say nothing of naked power ploys and land grabs, many leading to brutal ethnic-cleansing, as in Myanmar. 

And don’t forget political and economic injustice.  Police state persecutions.  Pervasive, kleptocratic corruption.  Concentrations of economic power resting on mass impoverishment.  Under these conditions, too, people eventually vote with their feet.   

Meanwhile, on TV or via snail mail, we the more fortunate are confronted with heart-wrenching appeals for contributions to alleviate the suffering of millions of refugees from war and injustice.  So many innocents are hungry, homeless, suffering.  Give. Give. Give.  Give more.  

But the giving is never sufficient.  Give more.

It is tragic.  Who but Bill Gates and George Soros and the rest of the 5% can give more than a mite compared to the massive need?  And how are we to triage among those in need of that mite when so many hands are reaching out to us?  The complexity is all but paralyzing.

Other People in Trouble

But wait.  Don’t donate yet.  There are many more claimants to our largesse, so to speak. Planet earth is a capricious mother with no concern for the welfare of her human children. Earthquakes.  Tsunamis.  Floods and drought.  Tornados and typhoons.  Wildfires. Houses are blown down or washed out to sea.   Farmlands are ruined.  Villages are buried.  Thousands of acres of forest and grassland are burnt, along with towns and homes.  And so the appeals begin.  Give.  Give.  Give.

But there’s never enough to give.  Especially since there are other claims on our  supposed “surplus.”  Cultural institutions need money.  Parks need upkeep.  Hurt animals need rescue.  Dreadful diseases need cures.  Give.  Give.  Give.   And so it goes, although the income of 80% of the U.S. population has been stagnant or declining for a couple of decades, and the American Dream is all but dead and buried.      

Oh, I almost forgot the cost of “democracy” in the U.S.  If middle class citizens can’t scrape up enough in campaign contributions to back candidates who, if elected, will represent them, the 1% will buy elections, own politicians and produce policy for their benefit alone.  And then what?  When the American 99% are thoroughly  impoverished, helpless and hopeless, where will we go, in a world already overwhelmed with refugees?

That may read like a joke, but it is no laughing matter.  

Buckets and Bandaids Won't Do

Yes, the richer countries can easily alleviate isolated pockets of misery.  They can absorb a good number of refugees, the exact number depending on the size of the receiving country, the state of its economy and the fragility of its political culture.  But the only practical and durable solution to the current flood of refugees from all directions does not lie with Europe or with the U.S. It requires thoroughgoing political and economic reform in Africa (supported by equally determined aid vehicle overhaul) as well as a resolution to the internal wars of religion and culture that are ravaging the Muslim world.  When these septic sores are healed,  humanity will easily be able to respond to the urgencies created by natural disasters, including climate change, and the normal duties of responsible and charitable citizenship.   

In the interim, to meet at least some of the costs incurred by the current refugee crisis, how about calling upon the billions (or trillions) stashed away in tax havens by corrupt rulers, bureaucrats and their business cronies?  Isn’t it time to delegitimate, totally and forever, the practice of offering secret bank accounts.  Tell the fat and happy enablers of global misery, those suave Swiss bank officials (and their colleagues in the Caymans, on the Channel Islands, on remote Pacific atolls and elsewhere, all of them screaming"unfair!") it's time for them to find a more honest, more constructive line of work. 

Meanwhile, the greedy kleptocrats and conscience-free tyrants of the world must be laughing 24/7 at the rest of us, so easily guilt-mongered into giving, giving, giving, to support powerless, desperate people whom their erstwhile leaders are happy to get rid of.  No, I don’t want people to go hungry and die of exposure, but it’s time to make it impossible for corrupt leaders to enrich themselves through the immiseration of others.  No loopholes.  No exceptions.  No secrecy.  Ever.  (And confiscate their London mansions, their NYC condos and their villas on the Riviera, too.)

And as for the religious war mongers, no pious exceptions for them either.  Murder is murder. Rape is rape.  Guys with guns who slaughter and enslave in the name of any god are criminals, not prophets.  It’s time for tolerant majorities of all creeds to reach across borders to one another,  leaving no room anywhere for murderous machos profaning any religion.  Christians believe that God is mercy and Muslims affirm their faith in Allah the Merciful.  Let them so act.  Together.   Lest we all end up in the merciless hands of self-annointed religious dictators.

Up to a point, it’s easy to toss a few dollars into this bucket, a few dollars into that one,  much easier than demanding and embarking on major systemic reform.  Goodness knows, the buckets are everywhere. But charity, individual and/or institutional, is clearly unable to cope  with a convergence of disasters on the scale of what’s happening today.  Band aids are fine for paper cuts: they won’t do when major surgery is required.   

Are my recommendations silly or insufficient?  Maybe.  But secret bank accounts are a blight of use only to those who have something to hide--and there's something to be said for not befriending international players who victimizing their people (no matter how tempting such alliances may be from other angles).  And if they are silly, then what?  Guilt-tripping ordinary people isn't working.

Third Greek Loan Progamme Takes Its Toll

By Lois Woestman, Guest Contributor

 Dr. Lois Woestman, both a Greek and US citizen, currently works as EU-Liaison Officer at a German university. She previously worked as Lecturer and as EU-Liaison Officer for two universities in Greece, as well as a research/policy advice consultant (including for UNWOMEN, Europe-based WIDE+ Network, and global Association for Women in Development – AWID). 

It is August 15^th, 2015. The third Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) in as many years was approved yesterday by the Greek parliament and the Eurogroup – the unelected European finance ministers organization to which most European political leaders have abdicated their power. In antithesis to the past six months, hardly anyone I have met in the last weeks in Athens or on the island Kythera is talking about it. What is going on? Though I am no psychologist, what I believe to have observed over the past three weeks is a generalized sense of burn-out induced depression.

 Exhaustion

People are simply exhausted. The constant hyper-tension since re-negotiations of the last MOU began in February under the Syriza government - following on five years of ever worsening economic depression - have taken their toll. My friends appear to have been put through old washing machine wringers. Their vivacity zapped, most people walk around like zombies, with intermittent outbursts of irritation. 

 Withdrawal

 People are also emotionally withdrawn. Unlike past reunions, which would go on for hours – all night - my friends manage about two hours, before they say something like: “Lois, I am really happy to see you. But, sorry. I need to lie down. I just don't have any more energy to talk.” Some had to cancel jointly made vacation plans, explaining that the most they could manage emotionally was to get to their nuclear families, where they could collapse. No energy for vacation? Greeks?  My friends?

 Most people I have spoken with have little if any money for vacation, anyway. Mid-August is traditionally the busiest time of year for tourism in Greece. Athens empties out. Greeks I have spoken to who have the wherewithal for a holiday have had to pare it down to just a few days – a week at most. They can afford to eat out once a day, otherwise managing coffee etc. in their rooms.

Tourist business owners on Kythera explained that, in addition to very limited Greek tourism, foreign tourism has dropped radically. It was a fairly normal season in May and June. But as soon as the capital controls hit, foreign tourists practically ceased coming. One of the few remaining sources of income for Greeks has thus been drastically reduced this year.

In Athens, where most of its residents have remained, people travel to beaches reachable by public transport: “In this way, we can take a break by the sea, and pretend we have gone on vacation.”

 Humiliation and hopelessness

 After the rough treatment of PM Alexis Tsipras in the post-oxi negotiations with creditors, people I have spoken with feel humiliated. Moreover, they are convinced that it will only get worse, as there are no mechanisms in place for economic recovery anywhere down the line in their lifetimes. Most serious reviewers of the newest MOU agree. Is it any wonder, then, that people are disaffected, experiencing the finalization of the third memorandum as anti-climactic? An older gentleman told me: “Now that Tsipras had to cave in to more austerity and micro-management of our economy - who are they to tell us about the size of our bread, and force people to work on Sundays when even they do not? - to keep us in the Euro, what is the point of following debates any more? All hope and any chance of retaining a bit of personal and national pride is lost.”

 Resourcelessness

This assessment of some of the burn out, aspects of the depression I see in Greece today are backed up by statistics, which show that depression as well as suicides rates have been on the rise in Greece since the Great Economic Depression began here. Suicide rates rose by 35% between 2010 and 2012; to my knowledge, no more recent figures have been released. Depression rates have risen from around 3% to 8% since the crisis began. Individuals are not accustomed to diagnosing or dealing with such phenomena, either in themselves nor in loved ones.

As one interviewee put it, “In the past, Greeks tended to yell, not let themselves go to hell.” Now, many people have passed the stage where they can yell. And even when they do – as in the overwhelming OXI vote to more austerity – it appears to have no positive effect on the outcome. It is indeed difficult to see what one could use as an argument to raise morale.

Nor is the medical system equipped to help. Even before the crisis, pyschotherapy was something only the well enough to do could afford, because it has not been covered by the health care system.

One commentator on the current economic moment in Greece used the phrase: “Well, to use a technical term, all hell is going to break loose.”A psychologist I spoke with used essentially the same phrase to talk about the portending psychological effects of it on others - and on himself.

See also on WhirledView: Greece, Germany and the EURO, by Patricia Kushlis, July 17, 2015.

 

http://whirledview.typepad.com/whirledview/2015/07/greece-germany-the-euro-even-on-sunday.html

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