What America (Really) Failed At

Progress and Potential

There I am, enjoying the summer thunderstorm beneath the cafe’s awning, furiously debating American decline on Twitter. A young girl runs in laughing from the rain and asks me for a cigarette. I give her one of my precious Dunhills, noticing the “homeless god bless” sign she’s carrying.

We start talking. I ask gently for her story, if she wants to share it. The smile drops away. She looks hunted, and tells me how she left an abusive relationship with no support system, no family, no siblings, no parents, and there was nothing for her but the street.

“Did you have a job before?”, I ask her, clumsily.

“Yes”, she nods, “I was a nursing assistant”.

But she can’t get a job now because she can’t get a birth certificate because she doesn’t have a driver’s license because her abusive boyfriend kept all her papers to spite her. She needs to track it all down, which is to say the least difficult with no fixed address.

The incongruity, the sheer strangeness, of it strikes me just like the thunder. Her sadness and pain. Me debating that very abstraction on Twitter, while the human reality of American failure is right there before me, wide eyed, young, abandoned.

What is she full of? How have we failed?

I am debating on Twitter whether America has made “progress”. I say: “this was a segregated society until 1971. Hence, today, we still struggle to develop public healthcare, transport. The rest of the rich world has them because while America were segregated, they were already able to build all that for everyone.”

But no one is really listening. They are not convinced. America is a shining and noble city on a hill. Isn’t it?

I’m not a politician. I never have been. I have a big mouth, a soft soul, and a wide open heart. Three strikes and I’m out. I try and fail every goddamned day to utter niceties to win people over and make them my friends, fans, followers, devotees. There’s too much pain and too much beauty in this little life to sugarcoat either.

I speak to you as an economist. We don’t look at progress. Politicans make appeals to progress. But brogress (good typo, huh?) is a jumbled and confused thing, which, in the final analysis, reveals little about the truth of a society, a life, a choice.

As an economist, I look at potential. Progress means little if it’s not denominated in potential. The great economist Amartya Sen demonstrated this once with a simple thought: a slave, he said, might feel good about being given a straw bed, not sleeping on stone anymore. But he is still a slave. Potential is the currency of progress. And for this reason, for example, the UN’s development goals don’t just measure progress, but progress towards potential.

And potential is what she is full of. She is a young and bright girl. Not more than 25. She is full of hopes and dreams. Not just the fear and hurt and pain swelling there beneath the laughter in the rain. I can see all that in her. Anyone can. She has more to give than we as a society are allowing her to give. We are refusing her gift to us — not the other way around.

We would all be better off giving her an education, a home, money, a life without fear and one resonant with possibility. Why? Maybe she would be a great doctor, teacher, nurse. Maybe she could save countless lives, heal the broken, save the wounded. We’d have a doctor or a nurse, the price of healthcare would fall, and life expectancy would rise. It’s not rocket science.

But there she is, and the limit of her desire is coffee and a cigarette while the storm thunders over us.

We have failed at human potential, not just human progress. Yes, Americans aren’t slaves anymore. But they are not really free — not in a sophisticated sense of the word: to live up to one’s inherent human potential. To give the best of themselves to one another. There is a nation of people just like her. Not homeless, perhaps — but just as suffocated. Not allowed, enabled, to be what they can and should be.

Human potential, unlike human progress, is not an abstraction. It is very real, very concrete. What is my potential? I have a life expectancy. I have an expected income. I have a number of books and talks and speeches and courses I can give. I have relationships I can have, accomplishments I can risk it all for, and so on.

The key word is can. I need something to live all that potential. I need people to teach me, guide me, nurture me. In the economists’ parlance, to “invest” in me. In human language, to hold me close and so set me free. We are all better off, every single one of us, when the homeless girl is a doctor, nurse, surgeon, teacher, engineer, than when she is a hunted thing huddling underneath the storm.

But who is hunting her? We. You and I. Not with bows and arrows. There is no need for the Hunger Games. Our weapons are even more deadly, because they are subtler. Neglect and indifference. We have failed at the challenge of human potential as a society. No blame, no shame, is necessary. Let us only have the courage and nobility to see our flaws. Then maybe with the truth in mercy, the mercy in truth, we can heal them.

She looked at me, surprised and a little suspicious someone was interested in her story. I looked at her, sad and hurt and worried. I didn’t have any cash. Not a penny. So I thought and I thought. What could I give her? It was all I could do, and it wasn’t enough. I went back to the cafe, and I wrote this.

Umair
June 2017