>>> james withrow <writes
This food thing is a typical leftist method of dealing with success. There are still people who miss meals and, yes, plenty of people who would have been institutionalized back in the day still have to dig thru dumpsters for food. But hunger as a problem similar to hunger and malnutrition overseas is not the problem Mark Jones made it out to be. Suggesting that you can simply visit a ghetto and witness the unfed is simply untrue and it devalues hunger in truly impoverished nations. The combination of food stamps, family, friends, and charity feeds the hungry.
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Now ask yourself what image you want the public to have of hunger in the U.S. in the year 2002-- that we've always had great problems with hunger that can never be solved no matter how much money you throw at them or that the new welfare laws are directly responsible for millions of children growing up malnourished.
I would come away feeling properly chastised by the attacks on what I said if they came from people who come into contact with big city ghettoes on a regular basis and actually could point to types of people who are currently going hungry. If people are going hungry I want to know why.
From my time a few years ago in inner city class rooms, I can tell you what teachers have said about what inner city students write in journals about their lives. The kids aren't writing about missing meals. They write about who they're attracted to and sometimes about the problems of sex and of course a lot of real blather. And, they're afraid of their neighborhoods, which is due in about equal parts to our insane drug laws and the ineffectiveness of the criminal justice system.
Fellow leftists, take credit for our accomplishments. There will always be more to be done. But in the last 40 years, we've seen great strides made on important social questions: racism, sexism, the poverty of the elderly, hunger, and even the environment. To deny that government action and commitment to movements has made a great difference is to say that it's not even worth the effort-- an ideology in too great a supply, already. _____________-
Charles: I don't think hunger in the U.S. is as bad as in many poor nations. But a few years ago there were public health case reports of kwashikur in Harlem. And infant mortality rates in some cities are reported as "at third world levels" from time to time. Low birth weight is a cause of infant mortality and malnutrition of the mother can be a cause of that. Going into a ghetto might not turn up cases as easily, unless you are a public health professional or a legal aid attorney, etc. The political point on capitalism is that there is some extreme poverty in the midst of enormous abundance. This is the main paradox that we do not have to stand for if we have the revolution.
What is written in journals by kids is part of the story, but not the whole story. Inner city kids have pride. They know about paternalistic, white liberalism at some level. They are not going to necessarily be socio-psychological guinea pigs for bleeding heart liberals. However, you are right that there is a lot of accomplishment going on despite institutional racism and capitalist empoverishment.
It's true that mass struggle has won reforms in the 40 years before the last 20 . Yet, because they are only reforms, they have been and are being taken back in in the last 20 in Reaganism and neo-liberalism, neo-racism etc. Our attitude toward the reforms of the 40 years ending about 1980 should be to say "see , capitalism cannot be reformed. If it is not destroyed it takes back the reform concessions wrestled from it in its weakness. Next time it is weak , we must put it fully in its grave.
Charles Brown
Detroit, where the city is the ghetto.