How do cultures cope with widesread, serious and overwhelming loss?

I recently received a ‘newsletter’ from old friends with whom I collaborated on the book, ‘Making it Happen: A Positive Guide to the Future,’ many years ago. They come in the mail two or three times each year. My friends might have changed the format of their newsletters to email or a blog, but, even though they are environmentalists, they have remained with the printed word. This means that their communications are less frequent than those transmitted by other members of my network. One consequence is that I always read the entire missive, either immediately or later.

Here is a reflection from the newsletter on the current heath care debate and social inequities that draws on Elizabeth Kubler-Ross insights about the stages of coping with loss. They write:

[Kubler-Ross] talks about the coping mechanisms, first denial, then ANGER, bargaining, depression and finally acceptance - diagnosed... when played out in he personal lives of people both dying themselves or losing loved ones. What if this diagnosis... is also the diagnosis, the template for understanding how cultures go through a time of coping with widespread and serious and overwhelming loss.

Despite the Kubler-Ross diagnosis of the source of all tht anger, we contemplate with a heavy heart the truth-distorting debate about health-care reform and the terrible demonizing of President Obama. How can seniors be so pleased with their government-sponsored Medicare coverage and yet fulminate against a ‘government run’ health-care option? How can people who have health care not care about people who do not? And about those whose bad luck with illness reduces them to insolvency? We find such callousness to others both sad and heart-rending.

Why ‘free markets’ often are not really free. The ‘systems trap’ of success to the successful.

I am reading a powerful and evocative short book, entitled Systems Thinking. It was authored by the late Donella Meadows, a close friend and collaborator of many years. It was edited by Dana’s former research assistant, Diana Wright and published posthumously after her death.

The current debate over health brings to mind a ‘systems trap’ Dana identifies (one of several) that she calls ‘Success to the Successful - Competitive Exclusion.’ Dana writes: (p. 127,128)

‘Using accumulated wealth, privilege, special access or inside information to create more wealthy, privilege, access or information are examples of [this archetype]’ This system trap is found whenever the winners of a competition receive, as part of the reward, the means to compete even more effectively in the future. That’s a reinforcing feedback loop, which rapidly divides a system into winners who go on winning and losers who go on losing.” The business executives about whom I wrote last evening are among the beneficiaries of this trap. Here are some other examples:

In most societies the poorest children receive the words education in the worst schools, if they are able to go to school at all. With few marketable skills, they qualify for only low paying jobs, perpetuating their poverty.

People with low income and few assets are not able to borrow from most banks. Therefore, either then can’t invest in capital improvements, or they must go to local moneylenders who charge exorbitant rates. Even when when interest rates are reasonable the poor pay them and the rich collect them.

land is held so unevenly in many parts of the world that most farmers are tenants on someone else’s land. They must pay part of their crops to the landowner for the privilege of working the land and so never are able to by lland of their own. The landowner uses the income from tenants to buy more land.

Dana does not write about health care, but it seems pretty clear that many those who are the leading charge against health care reform, using their wealth and position are not numbered among the 47 million Americans who lack health insurance, a national disgrace. This includes of course, many - not all - members of Congress. No member of Congress, of course, lacks health insurance coverage. That would be unthinkable. Like many - not all - high-level business executives they view themselves as members of a high caste elite, that is not governed by the circumstances, nor constrained by the moral precepts with which ordinary folk (the low caste and untouchables) must deal.

AN ADDITONAL THOUGHT: This blog later evoked a reflection on how to write in a way that will change people’s minds. This is something I discuss in my ‘International Development’ course. It is a challenge that reformers and spiritual leaders face. The blog I wrote was a reflection of outrage and anger, but if its goal was to transform those whom I targeted as complicit in injustice, it almost certainly did not achieve its goal. The great spiritual leaders often write that such transformations must begin with connection, forgiveness and empathy. Among leaders now living, Nelson Mandela may exemplify this best.

'We thought it would disrupt people's commute too much."

This monday evening, shortly before 5:30, A Washington Metropolitan Transit Authority Train crashed into a second train, parked at the station. Nine passengers were killed and many more injured. What caused the crash is still under investigation, but some facts seem clear. The computerized system that was supposed to control the train failed. The driver attempted to stop the train manually using the emergency braking system. That, too, failed. The cars on the train causing the crash were the oldest in the system. In 2006, the National Transportation Safety Board had recommended that they be removed from service. The Board has the authority to recommend, but no enforcement authority. According to news stories, the head of the Washington Area Metropolitan Transit Authority declined to follow the recommendation. There were no funds available to replace the aging cars, he is reported to have said and removing them from service without replacement would be ‘too disruptive.‘ Unplanned disruption has now occurred, of course. For those who have lost their lives their families the ‘disruption’ has been catastrophic.

The crash occurred at a time when, just a few miles from the crash site, legislation to limit global warming and legislation to reform the America’s dysfunctional health care system are being debated in the halls of Congress. The proposals being offered have their flaws, no doubt, but the objections of opponents sound much like those with which the head of the Metropolitan Transit Authority responded to the NTSB in 2006. Fighting global warming will be ‘too disruptive’ of the economy. Addressing societal and economic problems created by more that 40 million uninsured Americans; by the most costly least effective health care system in the industrialized world disrupt our system of private health care. Not too long ago, the same voices were speaking out against and effectively lobbying against more rigorous regulatory oversight of America’s financial system. No doubt those arguments, too, attempted to stoke fears of ‘disruption.’

‘Crashes’ that are a consequence of global warming and a dysfunctional political culture in Washington lie ahead, and not too far in our future. They will be disruptive.