I see that word bandied about a lot, especially in the political climate of the day. Entitlement. It has been turned into a dirty word by many of our political leaders to describe the programs and services that provide basic needs for the underprivileged and poor. At other times, it is used in it's other context which is to describe people who believe they have a right to something but even in this context, it is directed at people, especially the young, who have grown up believing that they don't need to fend for themselves and that help is always out there...that the safety net is always available.
The current political goings on of our country and many others insists that we are certainly coming up against the hard limits of resource scarcity as the rich run about waving their hands in the sky and villainizing so called "entitlement programs" as being the chief enemy of the state. It's war on poverty in which the enemy becomes the impoverished, not poverty itself. In essence, it is much like dropping bombs on civilian neighborhoods instead of trying to defeat the army supporting the dictator.
I did a number crunch years ago when the big American "Bailout" happened. I'm not good at Math, but what I came up with is that if the Government had taken all that money and distributed it freely, it would have amounted to several thousand dollars per person of voting age in this country. To include children under 18, it still would have amounted to several thousand dollars. What people might do with such a windfall is beside the point. It is likely I wouldn't have a dime of it left so I am not a good example. However, it was handed out to banks and corporations that, in a free enterprise system, should have been allowed to fail. When we have the economic resources that this country does, it is hard to understand why Native Americans are forced to remain on impoverished reservations, why children go hungry and why our elders are forced to live in toxic mobile homes or in nursing homes because they have no retirement after paying for their child's college education.
I don't like the term "redistribution of wealth" because it has become a battle cry for the Conservative elite to beat their chests to. Many of them still try to cry "Socialist" when that term has been bandied about, even though the socialists (with the possible exception of China) have been firmly blunted against the anvil of failure. However, it is important to note also that China is capable of remaining as a sovereign nation because it has provided so much cheap rubbish to the U.S. economy. Redistribution is a miscalculation of English because it suggests that the goal is to take money away from people who earned it give it to others in an attempt to level the playing field. One only has to look at the Socialist countries of the world to understand that a redistribution of wealth guarantees only that the underclass have the same amount of money rather than the same amount of resources.
In my opinion, a country as rich as ours has an unbelievable opportunity to ensure the welfare of our younger generations by funding education, providing food for the hungry, keeping clothes on their backs and a roof over their heads. The trauma and anxiety of living hand to mouth for people in low income areas is alone enough to warrant such funding. So, instead, we go to war again. Considering that by all accounts the great enemy of America, Osama Bin Laden, was killed years ago, why are we still sending troops to Afghanistan? Why are we still occupying Iraq? Why do we even consider bombing Syria? Our government wishes us to believe that it is to protect us from terrorism but we undoubtedly create more enemies with every Drone strike and black ops mission. Instead of bombing people, we should be doing food and clothing drops to the homeless and ensuring that our own nations children are cared for before making orphans in another.
Of course, this is all political but it is also the political machinery that brought us here to begin with. I can't say enough that as long as the road to Wal-Mart is paved, most people don't give a shit. It is easier by far to villainize the poor by making them out to be lecherous bums than to address the real issue of social reform and an equitable distribution of actual, physical resources.
I keep coming back to the idea that in a country as wealthy in Natural resources as we are, the prevailing paradigm is to pretend that those who are denied the opportunities that the ruling class are afforded are expected to "rise above" their circumstances as proof that anyone can live the American dream. Forget the fact that the "American dream" is no longer a dream of freedom, it is a dream of wealth.
As a species it makes sense that wealth attracts us. Before the advent of oil and all its related opportunities, we only settled in places that could support our diets and other immediate needs. Those that settled in places that for most others seemed inhospitable, only did so when they were capable of creating a niche they could live in. The discovery of the myriad uses of fossil fuels has essentially driven our expansion in both population and ability to live in the far flung and otherwise inhospitable regions of our own planet.
Like any other species, when we see an opportunity to exploit an increase in energy consumption, our instincts tells us to do so. This was simpler when we lived in smaller communities because an exploitable energy surplus in the environment usually meant that the whole tribe shared in the lottery money. Today, what it tends to mean is that someone gets most all of the spoils and it is not shared with the tribe. In short, there is no greater sense of entitlement in this country than the entitlement of the rich and powerful.
I have long considered a gentlemen I knew years ago who I first met when he was going yard to yard in a snowstorm offering to help people shovel out their yards and cars. He was asking $10 to help which, when you need to get to work in a hurry, isn't much. We struck up a conversation while we worked together getting my car unstuck and I offered him a ride to the next potential customer and paid him $20 because all I had was a Twenty and he worked really hard to help me out. He used to come down to the place where I worked and we built a pleasant friendship out of the experience. At the time, I didn't have much money and spending $20 for the service he did for me was a bit more than I could afford but I made due somehow. He was saving up as much money as he could to move back to Georgia and 6 months later he finally did. The point is that even when I didn't have a lot of money, I chose to share my resources with someone else who needed them. I never felt as though he was taking advantage of me or my kindness. I had to insist several times before he would accept the extra. I even bought him lunch a few times just for the hell of it. In reality, we have no real need for lavish homes and fancy cars, our basic necessities can be secured for far less than we might pay for fancy things. That is not to say that having something nice is bad or wrong. I have many nice things and I appreciate the fact I can afford to spend my resources on them. On the flipside, if I were to have saved every penny instead of buying some of these nice things, I might have a nicer car or a bigger house. If those things interested me...Therefore, it seems reasonable to me that we can do away with the argument that spreading our resources around in such a manner befits our species in any practical way. In the end, that is what I am talking about here: Practicality. With the resources available to us right now, we can, in all practicality, ensure that every person on Earth is taken care of until at least the age of 18. The problem is that in general, it is our selfish disregard and apathy that get in the way. It is not enough to understand what prejudice is, we have to stop doing it and supporting the institutions that do.
When you weigh all of this against the hard limits of a finite planet, the best that you can really do is to establish small communities that have common goals and philosophies and build on them. So many people out there think that social justice organizations will be able to turn the tide in their favor if they can just appeal to people enough. While I believe that such organizations are certainly valuable, to turn the tide of prejudice we need to appeal to our children and educate them. What we need to do is appeal to the parents to begin the process. What we tend to do instead is appeal to people to change themselves and most people will go with the flow of public opinion which is typically to vilify a certain group of people and blame them for all of our problems.
Such is the obvious case with the impoverished citizens of "developed" countries. While Wall Street CEO's are complaining about the bottom line cost of welfare they are taking multi-million dollar bonuses from the banks they run because the government provided billions in corporate welfare. With the money that our government spent on bailing out these organizations, we could have fed every child in America to age 18 and provided free, high quality healthcare. When I think about it like that, it makes me angry. So much of what we expect in this country is social, it is what we are raised to understand. We should be helping to create a social framework that encourages future generations to think and act for themselves. By doing so, they will either create their own communities or become valuable members of the community they are in. We don't need the government to do that, we only need ourselves. I'd really love to know how any thoughtful human being can look at a starving child and assume that their bonus is more important to the future of this country than a living breathing person who may not make it. Anything else, in my mind, is the true miscalculation of our species.
No comments:
Post a Comment