We are not separate: Chapter the Fifth of “Eat the Rich & Share the Wealth”, wherein we poach Pierre and Pam Omidyar & Sir Dick in a ’59 Latour.

February 3rd, 2010

As rescuers

hacked at the rubble, looking

for survivors, residents were out on the

streets searching for water, for food, and for fuel.

In Pétionville, a gas station had opened for business, and

that morning a long line of cars formed; mixed among them were

men and women on foot, holding plastic jerricans and waiting anxiously

for their turn at the pump. An elderly woman came up to the people in line and

asked politely for help. The charred corpse of a man, said to be a thief, lay at

the curbside across the street, in front of a bank. His head was crushed and

his legs were strangely folded behind him, and a small pile of rubbish

was gathering around him. As people walked past, they cupped

their hands over their noses and mouths because of the

smell. A few feet away, young touts sold scratch

cards for a mobile-phone company

to passing motorists.

Frantz and I

were in his black Toyota pickup truck,

and we had not gone far when we braked to allow a group

of teen-agers to cross the street in front of us. They were being led by

a tall young woman in a white tunic and a long black skirt. They

trailed behind her as if she were some kind of Pied Piper.

As they passed in front of us, she gave us a sidelong

glance of polite recognition,

and we carried on.

Four or five hours

later, in the flatlands at the edge

of the Port-au-Prince airport, we saw the young

woman and her followers again. She was standing amid

a scrum of onlookers outside the gates of the airport, where U.N.

and American planes were landing on the airstrip beyond the little

terminal building. We stopped and hailed her, and she spoke to us, surprisingly,

in English, with a Southern drawl. She said that her name was Nadia François

and she was from Delmas 75—a neighborhood five miles back up into the

hills. She had come down, she said, in representation of some three

hundred people there who were in need of help. She handed us

a paper with a handwritten message that attested to her

mission, signed and stamped by a Protestant pastor.

Nadia had led her group down to the airport

after hearing that the U.S. military

was handing out food.

…After a few miles,

we stopped on a middle-class street,

fringed with shade trees, where there was a gap

between houses at a bend in the road. A crude patchwork

awning of sheets and tarps stretched across the gap,

and underneath were a large number of women

and children, living on mats that

had been laid over the

pavement.

At the far edge

of the awning, the street ended,

and the ground fell sharply away. Below,

in a ravine twenty or thirty feet deep and about

a hundred feet across, was Nadia’s community, Fidel —

named after Fidel Castro, she said—where she and three hundred

other people normally lived. (Delmas 75, I realized, corresponded to the

street that ran past the ravine and appeared on city maps; Fidel itself

was off the grid.) It was a dry, stone-filled riverbed, filled with

a geometry of cinder-block and tin-scrap dwellings,

one of which was her house, a twelve-foot-square

cinder-block structure…

Jon Lee Anderson

Did you

grow up in a family,

like so many of us?  I did.

Raised a daughter

in one, too.

And did you

share in your family?  We did in ours.

My father was the only one who worked for money

when I was a child, but he shared it with the rest of us.  My mother

was the only one who knew how to perform the work of the kitchen, but she

shared what she made there with the whole family.  I shared my ability

to operate a lawnmower, and my sisters washed dishes.  Everyone

contributed what they could, and it worked.  I always

did the same with my daughter,

my dog, others.

I marvel

when Americans take to

the street and get blood in their eye

and shout about “socialism”!  Somehow it doesn’t

occur to them that the streets that they drive on were built by

the socialism of public roads, that the planes don’t fall out of the sky or strike

one another because of the socialism of air traffic control, or that it’s the

socialist-funded police and fire departments that keep their

homes safe and standing.  Socialism is

the societal version of

family.

Not everyone

has family in this world.  My parents

took the trouble to make me aware of that when

I was a child.  We had orphan friends, both my sisters and I.

They spent Christmases with us.  When we went shopping for school clothes,

they went with us.  Why?  I dunno.  I guess my parents thought that everyone in

the world deserved some love.  I guess they didn’t see that others were

separate from us.  If my mother was entitled to share in my father’s

income, and my mother was obligated to share supper

with me, why not my friend Labron?

Why not Julie’s friend

Dawn?

I don’t know

why my folks have always

thought like that.  It wasn’t because they

grew up farting through silk.  Both were children of the

Depression, and poor ones.  They live just fine now, comfortable house

in Florida with a little swimming pool out back, but when I was growing up,

we weren’t rolling in dough.  A few new shirts and a few pairs of pants, that’s what

I remember getting at the beginning of the school year.  They built a house for

the first time when I was twelve — four bedrooms, maybe 2,000 square

feet, on a quiet street in Chattanooga.  We went to Europe,

once, also when I was twelve — I think maybe that

came out of a modest inheritance,

like the house.

But my

mom and dad always had

not only enough for us, but enough for others.

Because in their understanding, we weren’t separate from others.

Black, white, orphan, Vietnamese refugee — everyone was in our family.

They fed a lot of people.  They found homes for a lot of people.  They

taught people English and got them jobs and softened the

sharp edges of their lives.  They’re 84,

and they still do.

That’s all

EarthNationLive is about: family.

I want to borrow a tiny bit of money from some

crazy-rich people for a few months so we can build an

effective system to feed, clothe, house, and educate people

like Nadia when they need it — now, forever, once upon a time, on

this blue planet of plenty.  I want to promote the understanding

of man, the creatures, the Earth, as one family, which

is what we are.  You’d think the people I’ve been

trying to explain that to would understand

that.  Didn’t they grow up in families?

But my phone doesn’t ring.  Maybe

the richer you get, the

smaller your family

gets.

Did you see

Bob playing soccer up there

with the dreads?  That’s what Bob did every

day.  He never left the people, not even when he was the

most famous musician in the world, playing to 100,000 people in

stadiums all over the planet.  He hung out in the yards of Trenchtown,

with regular people.  His bass player, Aston Barrett, came to be known as

“Family Man” because when Bob Marley and the Wailers hit big,

he started taking care of people all over Jamaica.  It is said

that he fed and supported 9,000 people

in the later years of

the band.

Bob

distributed money

throughout his band because he understood

the band was his family.  Family Man distributed money all

across Jamaica because he understood Jamaica was his

family. May we all one day come to understand

that there is no one who is not

in our family.