I imagine what life is like for people who have nothing, who are raised by parents who do not care about them, and who are put into schools that are so sub-standard they have no hope of educating anyone, save the brightest students who will educate themselves, despite the system. I imagine children with unidentified learning disabilities who try and try and try again to do things they will never be able to do without assistance, assistance that never comes. I imagine what that does to the being of a person. To fail and fail and fail, know you are trying your hardest, and not understand why you continue to fail. I imagine while I eat at any restaurant I choose, or buy whatever luxury items I want, what it must be like to live month to month in a crummy hotel, because minimum wage won't pay for anything else. I imagine what it must be like to live in such a material culture, as the culture we live in, without material things.
This is NOT OK. The homeless, the hopeless, the abused, they are all part of US. They are not the other, unless we choose to see them that way. What is the price tag for a human life? How much waste of human potential, actual born human potential, can we tolerate? There are people in this country who moan about the unborn, and yet they are not doing their utmost to save the already born. I am concerned for the already born. I am deeply concerned and I wish I could do much much more than I am doing. Money, imo, seems very little, when you have what you need and more. I am sure some people imagine their needs to be much greater than I imagine mine to be. What you buy with your tax dollars is stability, and peace, and fire, and mosquito abatement, and roads, and food for the homeless so they won't come knocking on your door begging for food, and money for education, so that when you are in a nursing home and expect someone to be working there, someone will be educated enough to be there for you, and the list goes on and on and on. We get an enormous array of services for our tax dollars. I just found out our city library now has Sunday hours!!!! I LOVE that. That's wonderful. I am so happy that my tax dollars are going to that. I am glad they pave the roads and keep the pot-holes down. I am grateful for mosquito abatement. I love our parks and rec department. I think our firefighters and police and paramedics are superb. I work in the schools- I am impressed with what we do but of course wish we had the money to do more. I've looked at the budgets- I've looked them over with the eye of a tax attorney. There is very little waste in our school budget. We do a pretty good job. We could do more with more money- we cannot do more with less, since we are pretty darn efficient already, owing to the last recession in California in the 90's.
I don't care to imagine what our founding fathers would have thought. I am not a revolutionary and I probably would have been a Tory sympathizer. After all the rich white founding fathers wanted to be richer- that's the main reason we broke with England. Australia and Canada did just fine sticking with the crown, and we probably would have too. Plus our founding fathers were hypocrites, not that that is unusual- it just doesn't make me respect them all that much. They are fine and interesting historical figures, but the only men I really admire are men who see the worth in all people, men, women, all religions, all colors. Men who see the worth in their own pockets, and the enhanced lining of said pockets, are not figures of rectitude in my moral schema. I can understand they might figure prominently in a schema that places more emphasis on lucre- mine does not. |
