Planet of Slums

Planet of Slums by Mike Davis is one book I have been reading lately. It has really caused me to think differently about Jesus’s command to Love My Neighbor. Davis describes a planet where the majority of people now live in the cities verses the rural areas of towns and farms. The majority of these city dwellers are found in huge mega-cities in the third world, the developing countries. Such cities have exploded in population during the last 60 years. Two examples are Mexico City and Seoul-Inchon, South Korea. In 1950 Mexico City had a population of 2.9 million; in 2004 it was 22.1 million. In 1950 Seoul-Inchon had a population of 1 million; in 2004 it had a population of 21.9 million. It is now seven years later. We can only imagine what those populations are currently.

Now here is the really bothersome part. A large number, maybe the majority, of those mega-city dwellers live in slums. They simply moved into unoccupied areas, fields or abandoned buildings, with no sanitary services and made a house of whatever they could find, be it discarded plywood, cardboard or mud. Why did they do this? The reasons are varied but one of the main reasons is they didn’t have enough food and came to the cities looking for work so they could buy food. They lived on or near farms and they couldn’t raise enough food to live on? No, because the land had been bought up by large corporations who paid them, if they found work, subsistence wages and shipped the food to the richer areas, including the United States, where the owners could make a bigger profit.

If this line of reasoning is accurate, and I think it is, then our standard of living which includes food from many parts of the world is at the expense of slum dwellers and other people dispossessed of the land they live on. Actually, we don’t have to look to third world countries to see this process in action. The family farm is close to extinction in this country as the large corporations buy up or rent existing farmland. Not long ago the surplus of food raised by American farmers was an embarrassment. Not so any longer.

How does Love Your Neighbor come into play here? Is it time to support world-wide revolution? One less flamboyant approach that more and more people are following is to buy produce and other foodstuffs from those who actually raise or produce them. Another suggestion which becomes more necessary as the price of food goes up, right along with the price of gas, is to live more simply, to eat wholesomely but not extravagantly and to consume less energy. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see the connection between corn being used to fuel our cars and the high price of beef.

Spirituality isn’t just praying. As we know, it is caring for each other as well as ourselves. It is sharing in more equal amounts the produce of God’s good earth. Can we bring nutrition and sanitation to the slums of Mumbai? Not all by ourselves. There is no excuse for not doing our part, however.

I have also been reading the wisdom of the beloved Jewish Rabbi, Abraham Heschel. The following quote of his applies here:

Morally speaking, there is no limit to the concern one must feel for the suffering of human beings, that indifference to evil is worse than evil itself, that in a free society some are guilty but all are responsible.

Citations: Planet of Slums by Mike Davis, Verso, 2007.
“Abraham Heschel: Militant Mystic” by Victor M. Parachin in Spiritual
Life, Summer, 2011.