Is America a Violent Neighbor?

Paul Farmer calls it 'Structural Violence,' and he's a lot smarter than me, so it was hard for me to argue at first. Farmer, subject of the superb book Mountains Beyond Mountains, wrote, among other books, a volume called Pathologies of Power. I started reading it a little while ago and, though not yet halfway through, felt rather compelled to write about it.

Farmer is a physician to the poor, and a humblingly talented one. He works in some of the poorest countries in the world, which he points out are also some of the sickest, and in this book he attempts to link these two circumstances in more than the usual 'it's sure too bad they can't afford penicillin' sort of way.

This structural violence that Farmer speaks of is the aggregate effect of the policies of the rich upon the poor. So far he has mentioned things like trade embargos, blockage of aid funds, and immigration policies. He goes on to note the great sufferings of the poor that might have been averted by the reverse of such policies.

Most of the charges are leveled at America, and although that is really just a circumstantially quirk of the book, I'll say that it qualifies this subject for posting on this blog.

As you can imagine, a staunch trade embargo or a stringent immigration policy do not help those people who are trying to pull themselves from the mixed mire of poverty and disease, but the question at hand is, Do they really hurt them?

Farmer's use of the term violence asserts a causal connection between such policies and the condition of the poor. The term brings up images of gunshots and knock-out punches - proactively damaging acts. Is such direct causality the case here?

Let me, for the sake of brevity, pose a question that helps to clarify the case.

You have a liter of water and a man nearby is on the verge of death by dehydration. By denying him that water are you exercising violence against him? Is his ensuing pain and death caused by your denial?

I think, perhaps no. I want to say yes.