On clean drinking water

Articulating some of my fundamental beliefs about how I think the world should work.

There’s something on my mind that it’s important to me to share, and I apologize if the point I’m about to make comes across a little bit sanctimonious (not to mention that that small number of you who are friends with me on Facebook may have seen me make this basic point before), but I believe in it strongly enough, and think it will likely resonate with enough of y’all, that it’s probably worth saying even if it’s fundamentally somewhat banal.

This is a photograph of a tall glass of clean, fresh, cold tapwater. I love drinking tapwater more than almost any other person I’ve ever known does – I sometimes need to flavour it in various ways, and as a type 2 diabetic I often desperately miss drinking things like white 2% milk, chocolate milk, peach juice, blueberry juice, orange juice, and Nestea-brand ice tea that were once staples of my diet, but I genuinely love tapwater, and I consider myself extraordinarily fortunate that I so thoroughly enjoy consuming a substance that is so essential to human well-being that it’s very difficult to conceive of life without it, such that I never feel burdened by my obligation to consume it several times a day every day.

The point I want to make is to fulminate at just how much it enrages me that the global community has done so little to ensure that literally every human being on the planet has access to the same clean and safe drinking water that I do. We’ve all heard stories of the horror in the majority-Black areas of the town of Flint in the American state of Michigan, which still doesn’t have clean drinking water all these years later, as well as of the “boil water advisories” in many First Nations communities in Canada, which is the country in which I (am mostly proud to!) live and whose government should be ashamed of itself for bloviating so much about right relations and reconciliation with its First Nations peoples in light of this kind of ongoing dereliction of duty, not to mention that there are also so many areas of the “Global South“ that don’t have access to clean drinking water that, frankly, it should scandalize and infuriate the entire international community on a daily basis.

I don’t have to go on at length about how fundamental water is to the well-being of human civilization in order to make the point that these injustices are gargantuan and catastrophic, and that they’re so egregious that they give the lie to the suggestion that the United Nations has its priorities straight or can be said to be accomplishing much of anything most of the time. I wouldn’t lay the blame solely at the UN’s feet, but I would certainly say that there’s virtually no reason for it to exist if it can’t come as close as possible to guaranteeing clean and safe drinking water to literally everyone.  

I realize that critics of American government power on both the political Left and (more frequently) the political Right believe it’s a waste of the resources of the government of the USA for it to do too much on the international stage (to be more specific, what I’m getting at is that both the Left and the Right tend to be skeptical of the exercise of American power for different reasons), but being someone who is a roughly unapologetic advocate of the thoughtful and intelligent use of American power to achieve positive ends, I don’t see any problem with the idea that it should be generally accepted that the USA should be expected to get involved in the promotion of efforts like this. There are probably hundreds of charities and humanitarian initiatives involved in making a positive difference of this kind as well; ultimately, my point is not necessarily only and specifically about drinking water, but about food as well, and probably also about pretty much everything else it takes for a human being to live a good and comfortable life.

One of the reasons why it’s so important to me to make points like this as often as I can get away with making them is because I take it as axiomatic that, at least as a matter of the raw moral and spiritual facts, every human life matters equally from birth, which makes it an ongoing scandal that anyone at all is forced to go without these basic necessities. As much respect as I have for the likes of, let’s say, Thomas Sowell, the nonagenarian Black conservative intellectual who writes persuasively about the idea that “solving problems” is impossible and the best that can be hoped for is to find acceptable trade-offs (and who further speaks eloquently about the idea that the correct view of human nature and of the nature of the human condition is that human life is fundamentally a matter of “constraint” and of making the best of what is usually a set of bad options, and that human perfectibility and utopian idealism are neither feasible nor necessarily desirable – I understand why very large numbers of people on the political Left despise Sowell, but I make no apologies for admiring that very shrewd and thoughtful and insightful man), the arenas to which I refer are ones that I don’t see a reason to be willing to compromise on. “The world will always be imperfect” is not a good enough excuse for it to be permissible that it should remain the case that there are people in the world without access to healthy and delicious food and to clean drinking water. Even without getting into a longer debate about such things as the right to housing and the right to healthcare (both things in which I also believe), I hold the points I’m making about food and water to be fundamentally non-negotiable.

I realize that very little of what I’m saying is especially controversial, and I promise I am not articulating all this in order to attempt to win brownie points from anyone in particular, or even from the concourse of my readership in the aggregate. I’m saying it because I believe it, pure and simple. As pure and simple as the drinking water itself. I suppose I’m permitting myself to make my case publicly because I suspect it will resonate with large numbers of you, but the sanctimony of the matter doesn’t explain why am bothering to speak up. I’m saying this because it’s true, and that’s the end of it.

Bottom line – I couldn’t possibly have been more grateful or more delighted to drink this beautiful and delicious and nutritious glass of cold and fresh tapwater a few minutes ago, and I want to register my gratitude before the world and make known my undying rage that not everyone has the same privilege I do in this respect. I believe it’s a good use of my time and energy to do that.