“If you spend our time worrying about immigration and ‘terrorism,’ you have no time to worry about:
— Our children being the unhappiest in Europe
— People under 30 who are on average have half the money their parents have
— .Students leaving university with average debts 10 times more than their parents
— An estimated 70 percent of adults who have taken anti-depressants
— Food banks as a ‘normal’ part of society
— Elderly people in care, many of who endure terrible conditions
— People dying of cancer being refused drugs we ‘can’t afford’
— Vulnerable people who have had benefits cut to save £30 a week
— Nurses on the breadline“
The next line is “I could go on, but I won’t.”
It’s very helpful in understanding our times to see different perspectives, and if you read this, it’s apparent the writer lives in another country.
Once again it’s my writer friend Steve Carter from the UK and once again he demonstrates that the Mother Country has many of the same problems we have. Ever since Margaret Thatcher in Blighty and Ronald Reagan over here, wealth that was supposed at least to trickle down has been streaming up.
Thatcher was worse, if only because she was smarter than Reagan. She also said there was no such thing as community, there were only individuals and families.
So what we have, both here and in the UK, is a situation where more and more of our national wealth is going to the people at the very top. In this country at least, something like 70 percent of people are just getting by, and a ridiculously high number could not handle an unexpected $400 expense without putting it on a credit card or taking out a loan.
Great Britain is perhaps the least European of European countries, as witness the disastrous Brexit movement of early 2020. The UK’s withdrawal from the European Union after nearly half a century of interaction with the continent is a parallel in a way to Trumpism in the United States, basically the rich and powerful conning an underinformed public into voting against their own interests.
I recently came across a song called “Heartland,” with lyrics as relevant as yesterday morning but was written in 1986 at the height of the Reagan/Thatcher era.
“Well it ain’t written in the papers, but it’s written on the walls, the way this country is divided to fall. So the cranes are moving on the skyline trying to knock down … this town. But the stains on the heartland, can never be removed from this country, that’s sick, sad, and confused.”
You may or may not be surprised to learn the song isn’t about the USA, although the ending is, in sort of a chilling way.
“This is the 51st state of the USA …”
We all grew up in this country believing it was the greatest place on earth and that everyone wished they could be Americans. Now the only people who believe that are the low-information types who have never lived anywhere else.
I remember when I was a kid that my parents told me how lucky I was to be an American, that kids in other countries couldn’t go to college if they didn’t score high enough on tests. Of course they didn’t tell me that they kids who did qualify got free tuition for college.
No one told us that working adults got 4-6 weeks a year of pain vacation. Or that they had government-paid health insurance. Or government paid retirement.
If you ask our government officials why we can’t have some of those same benefits, you’ll get four words in response.
“We can’t afford it.”
Of course the saying to incomplete.
Here’s the full reason.
“We can’t afford it unless we ask rich people and corporations to pay more taxes.”
Two things are true about our country.
One, we provide average citizens with less in the way of benefits than any other country in the free world.
Two, rich Americans pay a lower percentage of their income in taxes than any other country in the free world.
We have elections coming up next week in which the party more likely to win has two goals — reduce benefits for the working class and cut taxes on the rich.
And let’s not forget they want to make it harder for people who don’t vote their way to vote at all.
Folks in Britain may worry that they’re becoming more like us.
Hell, what worries me is we’re becoming less like ourselves all the time.
My country used to be.