The accurate diagnosis

Without a mirror you can’t know what you look like, unless someone tells you. Similarly, there are truths about us Americans that we’re blind to unless an outsider illuminates them for us.\nTake this quote published last week by Karoli Ssemogerere in The Monitor, a Ugandan newspaper: “Poor countries like Uganda cannot afford to institutionalise the mentality common in the western world that undesirable populations do not deserve to live.” \nWhile this quote certainly didn’t refer to impoverished and middle-class Indians, it’s particularly appropriate for us this week when the Kelley School of Business has invited the CEO of Dow Chemical Co., Andrew Liveris, to speak at the annual Indiana Business School Conference.\n(In case you missed the protests last year and the letters to the editor this year, Union Carbide, a subsidiary of Dow Chemical Co., was responsible for the deaths of 22,000 Indians in 1984, according to TheNation.com. Thousands are still suffering ill effects from the disaster at the Bhopal chemical plant, and American businessmen have largely escaped prosecution for the incident.)\nOf course, Union Carbide didn’t intentionally kill anyone, and it’s unlikely it would characterize the people of the subcontinent as “undesirable populations (that) do not deserve to live.” Nevertheless, the manner in which the Bhopal incident was handled certainly implies that American businessmen believe Indian lives are worth less than the lives of American businessmen.\nSeeing this blatant disregard for life, we must ask ourselves: Do we in the Western world actually believe that there are “undesirable populations (that) do not deserve to live?”\nIt’s easy to see from a map of Bloomington that we have an undesirable population we think doesn’t deserve to live among us. On the west side of town, between Highway 37 and Third Street, is an island of southern Indiana that has been enveloped by the Bloomington city limits, but not incorporated.\nThe city has greedily annexed the adjacent strip malls and shopping centers, but has rather conspicuously failed to annex a trailer park and its surrounding neighborhood, making a neighborhood that is “in” Bloomington but not part of Bloomington. Is the city government passively discriminating against a trailer park full of lower-class yokels? It wouldn’t be very surprising for a city full of University people devoted to “diversity.”\nBesides, they don’t pay as much in taxes as Kohl’s and The Olive Garden.\nHowever, Ssemogerere was not referring to Bhopal or Bloomington’s trailer parks.\nThe opening quote came from an article regarding the possible legalization of abortion in Uganda. And Ssemogerere has accurately diagnosed that we in the West believe unborn children constitute an “undesirable population (that does) not deserve to live.” That is, our fetal population is undesirable and subject to arbitrary execution.\nUgandans know what they’re talking about. They survived two decades of genocidal dictators who arbitrarily decided which undesirable populations deserved to live. This accusation would not be made lightly.\nSo, dear reader, consider: Will you write him off as another uneducated, dark-skinned, backwoods bumpkin? Or will you let Ssemogerere be a mirror to your soul?