The headlines in the news: "Over 1 million New Yorkers must choose between rent and food."
That's only news to the wealthier classes.
You may not be hearing much from me, again. I'm about to have my heat and electric turned off--in the dead of winter. And I'm working! Actually, if I was unemployed or still on disability, I'd be better off then I am now, when I'm working 39 to 50 hours a week! When I say I hate America--by God, I mean it. The American dream is a myth...the idea that all Americans are rich, is an outright lie. We don't even have NHS---millions and millons lose their homes every year and go hungry, and even die--yes, die--because they have no money for medicne and doctors---or, they spend all their money on medicine and doctors and have nothing left for food and shelter--so they (the elderly, families, the disabled) give up eating and having a roof over their heads, and go live in homeless shelters and ratty-assed motels and dilapidated dangerous public housing. And the rest of America simply doesn't know or care. And corporate America and the politicans--both state and national---remain blithely oblivious.
That's the REAL America. It ain't pretty. Millions out of work, millions more working with absolutely nothing to show for it (yours truly in this category), millions more homeless, millions and millions and millions. And the numbers are growing everyday, and no one cares.
What worries me is, I've seen this before: the French revolution, the Russian revolution--both grew out of an elitiest culture partying like there was no tommorrow--while millions suffer in an anonminity. It's happnening here--I mean it. I've talked to others---historians, political scientists, people in my own position who have the misfortune of being thinkiers---it's happening here...not the same as what led up to the other revolutions, but still...remarkably similar in many respects.
I can't say if it will ever come to that extreme here--Americans have been slowly discouraged from thinking..public schools in America are notoriously bad...and getting worse. Conservative poliiticans have threatend to remove funding for colleges who encourage "liberal" thinking (aka: thinking), and in fact, have been chucking out college funding for the needy (I am proof of that). Educational budgets are being slashed all over. Yet money magically appears for the big oil companies and other corporate powers. Money magically appears for projects that benefit the few, while projects that benefit those whose needs are desperate, shrinks and shrinks and shrinks. The American politicians give themselves nice raises while shouting down the need of low-income Americans for even a small raise in the minimum wage, so they can maybe eat decent or keep the roofs over their heads.
I'm no communist, but by gosh, in many repects, Karl Marx was dead on right about capitalism--or rahter, what we have now, extreme capitalism. This country's social structure is collapsing under the weight of coroporate greed and general apathy of those who are better off ("I've got mine, to heck with everyone else") and I don't know how much longer this country can survive without some sort of drastic change--or at least a little more realistic viewpoint on the part of her peoople.
