Dear LL -

Please, there is no off topic when it comes to the essence of things. And you're right, we have greed, loss of community, loss of compassion, the list goes on. Sometime back, I want to say roughly 25 years ago, I first heard "what have you done for me lately?" I was appalled, but the other guy mean it. It was as they said, morning in America, Reagan was president, and the government was the enemy. But more importantly, they had thrown out the entire Hegelian concept of that state as the representative of the people. The vehicle by which they carried out their choices. Of course, I did so in Minnesota, still part of Scandinavia in many respects.

And then it got mean. Too tired to chart all of the twists and turns, the deliberate efforts to dumb-down the electorate (beginning with support for public education under Reagan) until - finally - everything was just about the maximization of short term profits. Who care if denying this patient treatment will result in greater medical bills in the future, we may not even insure her then, and, more importantly, I'm not going to be sitting in this particular job when that happens, whether or not I'm still with the firm.

On one hand, we lost the wisdom that fundamentally generates compassion, without my perception of you, there is no me. On the other hand, and about as far from poetic expression as I can get, we lost the idea of "social capital," that a mark of a society's wealth was what it had and was continuing to invest in its citizenry.

And the homeless man? We put him out of the state hospitals and into group homes with his new meds. Except then the waiter showed up with the check for Vietnam - a decade after the fact - "hard choices" had to be made. And fundamentally the "middle class" couldn't have cared less about "those people." So no money for (enough) group homes, mo money for meds. [And just to show that I'm not working an Anti-American bias, the same thing has happened to one degree or another in every country with National Health Plans: they are voted in by the Left and the, when the Right comes to power, it's never politically expedient to scarp them, they just have to make do with fewer resources.] And then, in the blink of an eye American manufacturing shut down overnight, and with it all of the jobs that had propelled those willing to work hard and long hours into the American Dream. But did anyone other than a few left over "fringe" politicians in Washington really care? Not on your life. They had theirs and that's all that mattered.

The residents of Grover's Corner, New Hampshire are spinning in their graves, to be sure.

Mike


PS Apologies for seeming to have ignored/walked on your post in the sarcoidosis thread. I was just so hot to trot when I saw the opening post, that I literally did not see your thoughtful reply. I'm sorry.