Have We Become a Society Without Compassion?

The senate voted last week to approve a bankruptcy bill that will allow credit card companies to recover from people even if they file from bankruptcy. They did this, despite evidence that the majority of bankruptcies arise from real crises in people’s lives—like job loss or catastrophic illness. In fact, medical bills are behind nearly 70 per cent of middle-class bankruptcies.

Before the senate approved this bill, they stripped from it two amendments designed to help out ordinary folks. One would have raised the minimum wage by more than two dollars, and the other would have prevented persons from filing bankruptcy in the event of a legal judgement against them for vandalism as well as raising the minimum wage. Chalk up one for the credit card companies, and businesses like Wal*Mart, who do not have to pay a living wage to employees.

The president is currently pushing tort reform and a revamping of Social Security. Social Security has problems that are relatively easy to fix, but the president proposes a solution much more comprehensive than the problem. The solution involves placing individual retirement accounts at risk, which basically takes the Security out of the program.

With tort reform, the plan is to place caps on the amount of damages a jury can award in various kinds of lawsuits. The proposal removes the whole idea of due process from the picture.

Then there is the matter of prisons. The United States has the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world. In many prisons around the country healthcare is sorely wanting and sometimes negligent to the point of causing death. Many prison hospitals are run by for-profit private businesses that submit a low bid, get a contract, and then figure out how to come in at the designated price. Cutting corners is almost inevitable. Publicly funded healthcare in prisons is not much better. Does conviction of a crime strip a person of all human rights?

Prison has become an all-purpose remedy for people we don’t want to deal with. One in four prisoners is mentally ill; half or more are in prison as a direct or indirect result of alcoholism or drug addiction. When people with problems other than breaking the law end up in prison populations, they often have problems. We address these problems with a prison-within-a-prison—lockdown, also known as solitary confinement. This kind of confinement has been shown to exacerbate many mental illnesses, but we continue to use it.

We keep large numbers of “enemy combatants” incarcerated for extended periods and prevent them from contacting family, legal counsel, or even knowing the charges and evidence against them. We make sure they are not on U.S. soil, so that our laws do not apply to them or their jailers.

Locally, the department of Mental Health and Mental Retardation was forced to close its crisis unit for lack of funding. When someone has a mental health crisis in Brazos County, there are no options for residential treatment; when hospitalization is required, patients are transported long distances to state hospitals.

Army recruiters are relentless in their pursuit of high school seniors. Kids whose prospects for college are dimmed by finances are particularly vulnerable to them and the large cash enlistment bonuses they offer. When they join the service and ship off to Iraq, they leave with great fanfare; when they return in flag-draped coffins, we keep it a secret—after all it would make it difficult to recruit more kids to replace them. To their parents, we pay a pittance, and give them their children’s last month’s pay, prorated for the number of days they missed because they died.

Young soldiers surviving horrific wounds that would have killed soldiers 30 years ago, are sentenced to life with disabilities, medical problems, and the mental stress of battle. Even the soldiers who escape death and injury are damaged goods when they return; many of them will have nightmares about the things they saw for the rest of their lives.

Because many of them are not members of the regular armed services, but rather members of the National Guard, their medical problems receive limited attention and then become their own responsibility. They receive no services from the Veterans Administration.

Meanwhile we, the people who have asked so much from them, drive around with yellow magnetic ribbons on the backs of our cars that say “Support Our Troops,” as if that were any help to anyone at all.

Where is the compassion we owe all these people? Have violent movies and video games corrupted us so much that compassion has gone out of style, or are the people running the government sufficiently safe from needing compassion themselves that they can afford to withhold it from those less fortunate? Those supporting these policies will continue to act without compassion as long as those who disagree with them remain silent.
© 2005 Ann Weaver Hart

Do Not Fall Silent

There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance--that principle is contempt prior to investigation.

--Herbert Spencer

Twice in the last several months, people have replied to e-mails I sent them to tell me to remove them from my mailing list. These were not people I did not know. Both of them had, at one time, considered me a friend. And then I showed my true colors—I’m a liberal. Now these people want nothing to do with me. I have become a social leper.

This is not an isolated incident. Conservatives all over are guarding their minds against liberal ideas. The Young Conservatives of Texas (YCT) has created a “Hall of Dishonor” where they enshrine the worst, most abusive professors at Texas A&M University. The abuse? Disagreeing with YCT, and having the cheek to admit it.
Stewart Nusbaumer calls this phenomenon the “politics of the closed mind,” a very fitting name. If conservatives were to have a mantra, it might be something like this: There is no viewpoint but THE Viewpoint, and George Bush is His prophet. Subscribing to any other opinion makes one an infidel of the highest order.

Worse yet, they frown upon the very act of exposing university students to divergent viewpoints. This makes one wonder what exactly the point of a university education could be. The name of the institution—university—implies the presence of a broad range of ideas, but today’s conservatives have a bizarre tendency to hostility whenever they meet anyone who disagrees with them. Sadly, this tenacious refusal to countenance any idea outside the realm of conservatism stands in direct opposition to the whole purpose of a university education, which ought to broaden one’s mind.

The conservatives have heard that liberals think them narrow minded, and they take it as a compliment. They see nothing unusual about refusing to acknowledge the validity of any idea they or their conservative sages did not conceive. Sadly, their sages are angry, vengeful people whose ethical standards align with Machiavelli. Think Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter.

These luminaries of the political world are oddly immune to the idea that truth is a somewhat less than subjective phenomenon. Truth, they would have the public believe, consists of saying whatever it takes to get the job done. The end justifies the means. It is only torture if it causes organ failure. It is abusive to voice one’s opinions when they do not agree with mine.

While conservatives practice intellectual dishonesty with abandon, liberals must never allow themselves to forget that while the front man may be a dullard, many of his accomplices are demonically brilliant. Perhaps the best example might be Ann Coulter’s bestseller, Treason. In this book, she posits that liberals are a traitorous lot who attack the United States at every opportunity. She calls them traitors and claims that they have committed treason, hence her title.

Likely most liberals saw this speech as figurative, thought Henny Penny was predicting the imminent fall of the sky, and went on about their business. She did not really mean that liberals are guilty of treason. Oh yes she did! Note carefully that treason is a capital offence, of which all liberals stand accused.
The legislature has fallen asleep, largely because the liberals there will not spend political capital on anything except keeping their seats. They seem to reason that if they butt heads with the conservatives, their agendas will never see the light of day. They confirmed, as the country’s chief diplomat, a woman who argues with her questioners rather than give a straight answer about anything. Civil liberties erode daily under the aegis of “security,” and liberal lawmakers assent to the laws that destroy these very liberties that the founders crossed an ocean and fought a war to get.

About seventy years ago, a right-wing ideologue rose to power in a western country. He hated communists with a passion. He lied to his people to make them believe they were in danger. He lied to other world leaders in furtherance of his designs. He was not a particularly intelligent man, and his command of the language was weak. He wrote a book that was passed around like scripture, although no one was really sure what it was about. He did not smoke or drink. Regardless, he convinced a nation to follow him, and those who saw through him spoke weakly, or not at all. After a time, it became dangerous to speak out against government policies, and those who knew remained silent. That silence cost the world—and six million Jews—dearly.
© 2005

A Tidbit on the State of the Union

Wednesday was Groundhog Day and the day the president delivered the State of the Union Address. It is an ironic juxtaposition: one involves a meaningless ritual in which we look to a creature of little intelligence for prognostication--and the other involves a groundhog.

Vaughn M. Bryant, College Station, Texas

Living Within the Budget

When George W. Bush announced his budget this week, he sprang more rich-get-richer schemes on an unsuspecting public than even the most jaded observer would have suspected was coming. The president says he focused on programs’ results, cutting only those programs that are not “effective.”

Among the things the president feels we spend too much on: Community Development Block Grants. The new vision: Let American urban centers crumble and die. The rich have already sucked them dry and moved on to greener pastures. Another program that is not getting results: financial aid for vocational training. What happened to “No child left behind?” It is back that way, somewhere in the dust.

Not that the president bears any particular malice toward anyone. He just fails to see the problem with being unable to earn a crust. After all, he has gotten along just fine, and his job skills are marginal at best. Kids who have financial problems can ask dad to help out, or if times are really hard, they can pawn the family’s silver candlesticks and the Faberge eggs the ambassador sent for Christmas last year.

The new budget increases spending for Homeland Security and defense. None of the money in the budget is earmarked for military operations currently under way. Those will be handled with separate “emergency” appropriations to the tune of $80 billion. This classifying of military operations as outside of defense is certainly realistic, since those in question are most decidedly offensive.

Perhaps it is hair-splitting, but emergencies are by nature unforeseen, and this is about as unforeseen as short hair coming out of a barber shop. Ray Charles could have seen this train wreck coming, and bright man that he was, would have stepped out of the way.

The president also talks about boosting the country’s readiness for biological attack. This might be a good place to increase funds. Perhaps we should start by getting an ample supply of flu vaccine for next year. On the other hand, maybe we should let a flu epidemic solve the social security crisis by thinning out the number of our “unproductive” citizens.

Since there will be a lot of scrambling and reorganizing to live with this budget, I’d like to make a couple of suggestions about how we can give the president what he wants, and still get out of the deal with our skins.

First, bring all the soldiers overseas home. Pack them up and bring them back. The political capital to be gained from this move alone is immense. Think about the good will generated by thousands of grateful significant others whose loved ones have returned home alive—or never had to leave in the first place.

Families can pay returning veterans to care for the maimed and wounded soldiers we will turn out of VA hospitals when we cut veterans’ benefits. After that, vets can bury the dead from the famine resulting from putting half the farms in the country out of business completely when the crops they produced last season do not fetch enough to pay the bills because we suddenly cut price supports.

After big business has exported the last decent job, we will no longer need armed forces, because regular people will have been tort-reformed out of any redress against polluters and irresponsible employers (we’re also cutting the EPA), and there will not be much left to interest a foreign invader anyway, particularly when Americans begin to view cockroaches as wildlife.

Second, let’s cut the crap, and write Halliburton a check. Skip the blood and guts, the funerals, flag-waving, and crying mothers and flat-out give them the money. We can spend less than we paid them last year, because they will have incurred no expenses to pass through to us. Further savings will come from money we do not have to spend on death benefits, armor, and training more troops.

Finally, we can take all those kids who will not be learning trades in vocational schools and give them on-the-job training as rat-catchers and recycling technicians (trash pickers). After all, we will need plenty of those as our cities crumble.

© 2005