Jon Johanning wrote:
>
>
> So if you hit them with an idea like single-payer or govt health
> systems, they don't think of it as a mutual aid system, but as the
> nasty govt taking "their" money in taxes and squandering it on some
> fool, "socialistic" wasteful boondoggle. (Mind you, enough such
> boondoggles do exist to keep this idea alive. But somehow no one
> thinks of corporations, even the HMO's, as wasteful and dictatorial.
> Haven't seen the film "Corporation" yet, but I hope it deals with this
> issue.)
>
I have no idea whether this is true. I'd be surprised if people in small
towns were oblivious to the notion of mutual help. Since a lot of people
work for corporations, I'd be surprised if they did not know that
corporations are wasteful.
I am still haunted by Chuck Grimes suggestion that the main difficulty of articulating and subscribing to the idea of a "common good" is that it would include ALL people -- brown, yellow, gay...
...without the idea of a common good, you can't understand the point of socialized medicine. I remember some years ago stopping in a service station and chatting briefly with a man travelling cross country in one of these mobile home things. He told me they were travelling this way because his wife was scared of AIDS, and with the mobile home the safety of the bathroom could be guaranteed.
I don't know what it would take to convince Americans that you can't just shut yourself away in a bubble and survive. In their own heads they may be riding away into the sunset, but in reality they are enclosing themselves in sterile, vacuous, vicious suburbs and rendering themselves more helpless and more dependent on oil every day. But they seem to like it.
An exchanges student is visiting us from France, and I was surprised to learn that in France, the cities are for the locals & the suburbs are for the immigrants. I guess that's how ingrained the shared/urban life is, that the French will not abandon it for the suburbs.
I'm not sure that the main hurdle in the U.S. is racism. It's one of the biggest to be sure. One of my most surreal experiences was sailing a 24-foot boat from Isla Mujeres (near Cancun) to St. Petersburg, Florida. I landed in this upper middle class town where everyone was white, everyone was over 65, everyone was well-to-do or better, and everyone drove a Continental or a Caddy. I was so freaked out, I went into the nearest bar and downed two straight Vodkas (I almost never drink). But I had to have those drinks. Then, I mostly wanted to throw some chairs through the window.
How can people live this way? How can we build a sense of community of interest....where there is no community -- only shards of identity and special interest groups?
Joanna