All about the Angle

On Monday the official number of those who had died of influenza was nearly 200. Two days later that number had dropped to 7. The logical conclusion therefore is that 193 were obviously faking their death and should be punished accordingly… Or that “official numbers” reflect political atmospheres.

What I find interesting is that as the World Health Organization (WHO) increases its alert level from 4 to 5, the second highest possible level, Mexico’s official numbers drop dramatically. How is this possible?

Calculating “official numbers”:

The flu breaks down the body’s immune system leaving the host body incredibly susceptible to other illnesses, namely pneumonia. Therefore, albeit the obvious connection between the flu and the pneumonia, only 7 cases can be exclusively linked exclusively to flu; and the number, therefore, becomes flexible. Deaths in the United States are frequently susceptible to this type of treatment. For example, an overweight man who smoked and drank heavily dies at the age of 40. In addition to his multiple health problems, he had diabetes and other health problems that could be linked to his unhealthy lifestyle. But how do we statistically count his death? Was it smoking related? Alcoholism? Or a diabetes or obesity related death?

The result is actually what makes us distrust statistics. While the statistics are not actually lying, they are misleading.  If we are only shown the figures from a particular angle, then we are only hearing one side of the argument.

But the real question here is to understand why countries and global institutions choose a particular angle. What is the motivation for increasing or decreasing the intensity of this potential pandemic?

Swine Flu Hits Mexico

Acting like an ambitious stock market broker each morning I wake up and read the current numbers printed in the daily. I turn on the TV and watch the images of the wind freely pushing trash around on the public squares because the people have abandoned the space. In the kitchen, while I brew coffee, I turn on the radio and listen to Carlos’s voice as it fights its way through the scratchy speakers and ill tuned knobs to tell me about today’s level of panic as announced by the World Health Organization and official institutions. I walk out onto the balcony on my seventh floor apartment and watch what passes below. The few people I do see have fashionably fastened a face mask over their nose and mouth, with various colors matching their outfit or designs drawn on the front.

And yet, as if to mock our genuine concern of the virus that lurks throughout the city waiting to further spread itself throughout the world on the backs of unsuspecting tourists just trying to fly home, a 5.3 earthquake ripples through the ground. And although it comes from below it pushes us all from above, and down into the streets we run, panicked, uncovered, and crammed together.

THE WALL

THE WALL

Apparently we are amidst the era of neoliberalim, which is defined by free markets and free trade and where capitalism encourages the global migration of workers in order to continually produce a cheap supply of labor. Many scholars argue that the flexible nature that underlies neoliberalism is closing the gap in wealth between developed and underdeveloped countries while the gap between the rich and poor within underdeveloped countries is growing rapidly.

Whispering her critique of Slumdog Millionaire, Katherine Boo adds a brilliant piece to the Feb. 23^th issue of The New Yorker, where she manages to send the reader back and forth the fence in Mumbai, which is the only physical barrier between the two extreme differences in wealth. In doing so, she exposes not only the vast difference in wealth that exists in India, but exposes us all to the atrocities that exist on the other side of our own walls. Whether those walls tangibly provide blinders and blockades against that which we deem needing separation, or a metaphorical wall that we create so that we owe no obligation to those in situations far more horrific than ours, we in fact have them. Boo tells the story of a young Mumbai child whose rather entrepreneur-like mindset manages to just barely eek out enough food for himself and his rat bitten ill sister by digging through the leftovers tossed over the fence by the super rich and selling the recyclable pieces. In doing so, she forces us all to look at the reality that Slumdog Millionaire allowed us to avoid; that is, “the fence” and the people that the garbage lands on as it’s mindlessly tossed over the side:

“The fences insured against a time when a scavenger in Gautam Nagar might learn that a shot of rare Scotch consumed in ten minutes at the Sheraton’s ITC Maratha cost exactly as much as he earned in seven hundred fourteen-hour days picking up aluminum cans and used tampon applicators, and find that information too much to bear.”