It gave me pause for thought. We
are a sad divided nation. There is so much injustice here it is hard to contemplate. The
worst part of it seems to me to be the fact that so many in this wealthy
nation simply do not care. There is a social milieu
that says in Ayn Randian cold fashion sink or swim on your
own; live or die on your own and that it is not the duty of a nation to
help those who cannot help themselves. It changed for awhile during
the Depression when Franklin Roosevelt altered the social contract
saying that a nation has the responsibility to care for its people.
We
still fight over this today as the pendulum now has swung the furthest
it can go to the racist rancid right. No one here should be sleeping in
the street; no one should be homeless without food without a job without
healthcare and without hope. We must decide who we are as a nation and
can we come to any agreement as to what use our riches should be put.
Our greatest expenditure is not, contrary to what Republicans say, the
social safety nets or so called "entitlements" -- which are not really
entitlements since we paid for them -- our greatest expenditure is the
military and since post WWII all the futile unnecessary wars this nation
has fought and how many lives lost that should not have been is staggering.
We have
wasted trillions that could have fed the poor, clothed the naked, built
housing for the homeless and educated the young. I have chosen my
political slant to believe we should care as a nation for those who
in this life did not catch a break; who were born into this life unlucky
by fate. As Harper Lee of to "Kill a Mockingbird" fame said “You
never
really know a man until you understand things from his point of view,
until you climb into his skin and walk around in it." Food for thought
on a snowy New England day.
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