Everybody,
I'm just a dumbass and worse a lurker, but I've been reading this exchange, and here's my two cents worth:
James Withrow says that the people he sees do not look as though they are undernourished. Where I work is two blocks away from a "housing project" (believe it or not, a pretty decent-looking one, where I myself probably wouldn't mind living - certainly I've lived in worse) and it is also right across the street from a free-food and clinic place run by a Catholic charity. Also I get panhandled on the sidewalk pretty regularly; it has been my privilege to buy quite a few guys quite a few beers.
Please try and restrain yourselves from calumniating me as a racist and a neo-Nazi when I say that I too fail to see the signs of acute malnourishment in the folks I see on the street. Sorry! But rather than taking that simple observation as an insult, I think we on the left should roundly congratulate ourselves for that state of affairs, for that is our doing. One of the reasons you don't see people literally starving on the street corners, is because leftists have spent the last seventy years working their asses off, against all kinds of opposition both mean and stupid, to establish the kind of social safety net that protects the out-of-work worker from outright starvation.
The real disaster is that, despite having a Democrat in the White House, we still had to put up with the destruction of the AFDC program. Everyone is whining about Monica Lewinsky; I couldn't give a fuck about Clinton's personal life (except as an aesthetic matter, good grief, what awful taste he has in paramours!) but I will never forgive him cutting off AFDC. In fact I refused to vote for the bastard on that ground alone - I know my Nader vote was effectively the same as a vote for Dole, but I'll be damned if I can vote for a man who signed away AFDC.
The shit's gonna hit the fan, but it hasn't quite yet, because we (we in the U.S.A. that is) are still on the up-side of the economic wave. When the economy goes in the tank, as it inevitably will in its wavelike way, then for the first time in over sixty years the miseries of unemployment in the U.S.A. will include literal hunger, especially for children. Damn American voters to Hell, whether it's ignorance, malice or both, they will have been finally responsible for this crime, children starving here in the richest country in the history of the human race.
Those "ghetto dwellers" down the street sure lack any sort of regular non-emergency medical care. Also they lack decent schools, and that's going to get worse quick, since the courts are going to let the local school board off the hook regarding busing, so now the school board can resegregate the schools to any suburbanite's heart's content, and then let the "ghetto" schools rot to uselessness. Most of the young people growing up there lack any reasonable hope for an education or a career. In place of police protection they get plain police oppression, what Philip Roth, in "Our Gang," called the "J.I.T.S.P." But the material fact remains, they aren't yet starving.
Ok, flamers, tell me where I went wrong, defending the statement of this guy Withrow, who has, incidentally, won my admiration by actually organizing workers into labor unions. I've never done anything so productive for the left as that.
Yours WDK - WKiernan at concentric.net
...ps, he's still wrong about Mumia...