It's been kind of interesting to watch people's reactions in the wake of hurricane Katrina. For the first time in my memory, the subject of news reports is poverty, and people really seem kind of shocked. It's as if all the really poor people in this country (and sure enough, there are tons of them) lived in a box that all of us privileged folk could not see into, and Katrina knocked a big hole in the box.
It's deeply troubling to confront this reality. We're so used to believing that America is the land of opportunity, and if you want to work hard, then no one has to remain in poverty. We hear statistics every day that sort of mask the reality of things. Even during the Clinton "boom years" of the late 90's, things weren't really that good. Statistics about employment would come out that made everybody feel great, but those statistics would fail to mention the large number of households in which the breadwinners had to work two or three jobs just to make ends meet (if everybody is working three jobs to make ends meet, there are a lot of jobs being filled!).
Troubling as it is, I am glad that some small recognition is beginning to emerge. Recently, it hit a little closer to home for me. A good friend attempted suicide the other day (the attempt was unsuccessful, I am glad to say, and the friend is beginning to get the help they need). This was a terrible day for me in and of itself, but the trip to the hospital emergency room proved extra terrible.
The emergency room was packed with people at 8 o'clock on Monday morning. Fancy LCD televisions mounted on the wall above the front desk continually scrolled messages about how many people are processed each year, day, and hour in this facility, and how you must be patient in light of this. I watched people (mostly minorities) sit and bleed from open wounds, slump over from exhaustion in wheelchairs, and try to comfort their sick children while they waited for 4 or 5 hours to receive medical attention.
My mother, a staunch Bush supporter and rabid conservative, always answers thusly when we have the conversation about health care availability: "anyone in this country can go to an emergency room, and cannot be turned away." As in, "everyone here has it just as good as Canadians in regard to health care, because no one can be refused care." This is true in a sense, I suppose. You can go to the emergency room, and they will admit you. As I learned while sitting in the waiting room, they will not necessarily admit you right away. They certainly will not admit you in a timely fashion.
Understandably, tensions run high in this environment. For those like my mother who insist that privatization and its gleaming efficiency will address these human issues, I submit the following anecdote about how this privately run health care facility (one of the largest hospitals in my county) deals with the overrun. On each side of the waiting room, there was an enormous $5,000 television upon which looped mindless DVDs like "Dennis the Menace" or some movie about friendly encounters with space aliens. The idea, I suppose, is "instead of investing in facilities to handle these poor people who will likely never pay us even if we ruin their credit and hound them with credit agencies, we will spend a few thousand dollars and try to distract them until we can shuffle them through triage and send them home with a band-aid."
Oh, yes, and then there were the "cops." Standing by the metal detectors at the main entrance were three white, overweight, gun-toting security guards. The purpose of these men became clear when a very sick looking black man in a wheelchair wheeled himself to the front desk and complained in a calm, non-confrontational manner that he had been sitting there for four hours, and was in a good deal of pain, and really needed to see someone. The front desk lady motioned to one of the guards who came over and in a very stern, condescending tone instructed the man that the only way he was going to see a doctor was to wait his turn, and he was going to go back to the waiting area, wasn't he, and be good and quiet, because if he caused any trouble, he was going to be thrown out of the facilities. I'm not making this up. It was hard to watch.
Now, I'm not blaming the security guard, or the receptionist, or the snappy doctors, or even the owners of the hospital who were out finishing off the back nine while basking in the profits from their hospital investment. I do not expect profit driven industry to care about people who cannot pay them for care. What concerns me is that all this occurs while a very sizeable portion of my paycheck leaves my pocket every month bound for the federal government. The federal government is not using that money to take care of its citizens who don't have the means, opportunities, education, or skills to take care of themselves. Instead, I cannot help but notice that every year my money is instead going to the military more than anything else.
Now, wait! Before you close your browser, give me a second to explain. This is not going to be a rant about how we need to quit spending money on the military. I am fine with military spending. In fact, in some ways, I think we need to spend more. When I look at how we treat soldiers and their families, particularly those whose service costs them the ability to ever hold down another job, to ever see again, or to even go on living, I think that we don't spend nearly enough. What is a human life worth in monetary terms? I think at least it is worth its earning potential to the children that are left behind. That is a very crass view of it, but we don't even get close to going that far. The best article I have seen in a long time on this subject is by Howard Zinn in The Progressive, and you can read it
here.
I'd also like to point out that the "under 2,000 dead" estimate of American casualties in Iraq is only Americans who died on Iraqi soil. If they can get you on a plane and send you to a hospital in, say, Germany before you kick, you don't get counted in that number, even if you died because you took a bullet in Iraq. If you consider those people as well, estimates are closer to 10,000. Also, at least 14,362 Americans so far have been wounded. It's much harder to support your family if you are missing arms, legs, or eyes. These are real costs we need to consider when making out our military budgets. Which brings me to my next point.
Perhaps we could address all of these issues at once. First, you have to cut the outrageous things from the military budget (and this is where most of the money goes anyway). For instance, the Missile Defense Shield. That is such a joke. I remember how everybody used to make fun of the frivolous "Star Wars" spending that Reagan did. I could not believe my ears when I heard that the Bush administration picked up this project again and started funneling hundreds of millions of dollars into it. So that is the first thing that needs to go.
Next, route the money from all those ridiculous projects into better real world training for soldiers. Put more army guys through medical school, and have them use their training here at home to take care of the millions of people who need care every day but have no insurance. Use the available man-hours of our military to rebuild inner cities, run community programs, and take care of elderly shut-ins. Why not make the military the next WPA? They could do combat training one or two weeks a month, and do constructive work for their local communities for the rest of the time. In the process, they would learn valuable skills without risking their lives and still make a decent living. And the upside of all this is that if there ever really were a need for a military force (I think history has revealed with gleaming clarity that almost every military action since WWII has been unnecessary, and some might even say mistaken) we would have a high-morale army of men and women who were well trained, intelligent, and familiar with solving real-world problems.
I suppose this hasn't happened because it would take large chunks of government welfare out of the bloated pockets of defense contractors, and instead distribute it among needy individuals like we see suffering in New Orleans or my local community hospital. I know this rubs a lot of people the wrong way. It rubs the administration the wrong way because of their close ties to Halliburton and similar industry that keeps the skids greased for them. It rubs people like my mother the wrong way, because she views it as the inception of a welfare state where lazy black people suddenly realize they don't have to work because everything will be handed to them on a silver platter by the government, courtesy of my hard-earned paycheck. But I respectfully disagree.
I understand that some of this sort of thing will happen, that opportunists will work the system, and that some of the money will be wasted. But it is a price i am willing to pay. If there are going to be opportunists stealing my money through the government, I prefer them to be needy black people who by the nature of the history of this country have been robbed of economic opportunity for hundreds of years. Better this than rich white military contractors who don't think twice about the targets of the overpriced bombs they are getting rich from selling. Also, I don't think it will be that bad. I think people stop being lazy and shiftless when they think they have a real opportunity to make their lives better. If the odds are stacked against me in a competitive market, I am far more likely to throw in the towel and start selling crack than if I think I have the same chance as the next guy to make things better. To me, real opportunity is the best impetus for productive, healthy work, and real opportunity will not exist without a redistribution of wealth.
In the meantime, I am saddened by the thought that some undefined goal that seems to be hurting far more people than it is helping halfway around the globe is more important than the poverty and lack of opportunity here at home. As I was leaving the hospital, and old man outside in a wheelchair asked me for help. It was hard to understand what he wanted, because he could not speak very well, but finally I realized that he just wanted me to take the brakes off of his wheelchair and turn him around so he could look in the other direction for awhile. I later learned from another friend that the old man had been brought in for care from a homeless shelter, but now the homeless shelter did not have room for him, and there was no place for him to go. The social worker on staff at the emergency room was trying to arrange for transportation to another shelter, but no one wanted to take him, so as I left, the old man just sat outside in the sun in his wheelchair, staring blankly at the ambulances coming and going.
