Ever since Reagan, that’s what we’ve been coached to think. Out there in TV’s FrenzyLand government is always the problem. A corollary is that money thrown at a problem doesn’t work.
Think about all the problems that are solved by money. Money buys gas in the car, childcare, pays the rent, stills the anxiety, hires contractors, builds highways and hospitals.
Conservatives claim they know how to spend money judiciously. Remember they knew who the real Deserving Poor were?
True story: I went back home to Canada from Santa Monica in 1980, trying to decide if I wanted to live there again. The experiment lasted two years: no conclusive results. I left at the dawn of Regan’s dismantling of government. I guess the War on Poverty didn’t work. A new dawn and the conservatives were going to get it right. By God.
When I came back in 1982, Reagan had emptied California’s state mental health hospitals onto the streets. Community mental health clinics were supposed to fill the need of the state hospitals but that never happened to the extent that it filled the need.
Broken people sat on curbs with suitcases and raved at the traffic. A subculture had been created that lived like troglodytes under freeway overpasses and vacant lots. Crime increased, of course, because it still takes currency to live in Los Angeles with any dignity.
I saw sights when I returned that were unimaginable two years prior. I’m only speaking of California, mind you; but it was happening all over the country.
I live in a tiny village now in the California mountains. It’s too cold here to be homeless in winter.
When I go into Los Angeles, I’m stunned by what I see–sights that are now commonplace. I want to remind myself that you have to be really careful what you get used to. What you get used to becomes commonplace and tolerated.
I’ll look up soon who said it, but it goes something like this: you can measure the humanity of a society by the way it treats its children, its old people, and its animals.
I wince when I see that. I wish I could just step off the planet for awhile until somebody can learn how to get it right. It’s not this Administration, and George Bush didn’t get it right either. Do you really hope the next one will?