[Dialogue] What is a social pioneer to do?

[kroegerd@aol.com]

 The following article is the most depressing I've seen to date.  Yet, I cannot take issue with anything here.  It is all too true!
 
The "church" as social pioneer seems to do well at the local level helping the poor and idsadvantaged.  However, I cannot seem to find that "church" leading the way toward justice systemically.  In fact, I can't seem to find anyone leading that charge!
 
Maybe Daniel Quinn ("Ishmael") is right.  A few will simply abandon the current system and let it decay into ruin.  I find myself tempted.  How do you feel?  Is our society worth saving?
 
Dick Kroeger
 
 
Is This the Death of America?
    By Dermot Purgavie
    The Mirror UK
    Saturday 08 October 2005
America's sense of itself - its pride in its power - has been
profoundly damaged.
    This week Karen Hughes, long-time political adviser to George Bush,
began her new mission as the State Department's official defender of
America's image with a tour of the Middle East.
    She might have been more help to her beleaguered president had she
stayed at home and used her PR skills on her neighbours. At the end of a
cruel and turbulent summer, nobody is more dismayed and demoralised
about America than Americans.
    They have watched with growing disbelief and horror as a
convergence of events - dominated by the unending war in Iraq and two
hurricanes - have exposed ugly and disturbing things in the undergrowth
that shame and embarrass Americans and undermine their belief in the
nation and its values.
    With TV providing a ceaseless backdrop of the country's failings -
a crippled and tone-deaf president, a negligent government, corruption,
military atrocities, soaring debt, racial conflict, poverty, bloated
bodies in floodwater, people dying on camera for want of food, water and
medicine - it seemed things were falling apart in the land where
happiness is promoted in the constitution.
    Disillusioning news was everywhere. In the flight from Hurricane
Rita, evacuees fought knife fights over cans of petrol. In storm-hit
Louisiana there were long queues at gun stores as people armed
themselves against looters.
    America, which has the world's costliest health care, had, it
turned out, higher infant mortality rates than the broke and despised
Cuba.
    Tom De Lay, Republican enforcer in the House of Representatives,
was indicted for conspiracy and money laundering. The leader of the
Republicans in the Senate was under investigation for his stock
dealings. And Osama bin Laden was still on the loose.
    Americans are the planet's biggest flag wavers. They are reared on
the conceit that theirs is the world's best and most enviable country,
born only the day before yesterday but a model society with freedom,
opportunity and prosperity not found, they think, in older cultures.
    They rejoice that "We are No.1", and in many ways they are.
    But events have revealed a creeping mildew of pain and privation,
graft and injustice and much incompetence lurking beneath the glow of
star-spangled superiority.
    Many here feel the country is breaking down and losing its moral
and political authority.
    "US in funk" say the headlines. "I am ashamed to be an American,"
say the letters to the editor. We are seeing, say the commentators, a
crumbling - and humbling - of America.
    The catalogue of afflictions is long and grisly. Hurricane Katrina
revealed confusion and incompetence throughout government, from town
hall to White House.
    President Bush, accused of an alarming failure of leadership over
the disaster, has now been to the Gulf coast seven times for carefully
orchestrated photo opps.
    But his approval has dropped below 40 per cent. Public doubt about
his capacity to deal with pressing problems is growing.
    Americans feel ashamed by the violent, predatory behaviour Katrina
triggered - nothing similar happened in the tsunami-hit Third World
countries - and by the deep racial and class divisions it revealed.
    The press has since been giving the country a crash course on
poverty and race, informing the flag wavers that an uncaring America may
be No.1 on the world inequities index.
    IT has 37 million living under the poverty line, largely unnoticed
by the richest in a country with more than three million millionaires.
    The typical white family has $80,000 in assets; the average black
family about $6,000. It's a wealth gap out of the Middle Ages. Some 46
million can't afford health insurance, 18,000 of whom will die early
because of it.
    The US, we learn, is 43rd in the world infant mortality rankings. A
baby born in Beijing has nearly three times the chance of reaching its
first birthday than a baby born in Washington. Those who survive face
rotten schools. On reading and maths tests for 15-year-olds, America is
24th out of 29 nations.
    On the other side of the tracks, 18 corporate executives have so
far been jailed for cooking the books and looting billions. The
prosecution of Mr Bush's pals at Enron - the showcase trial of the
greed-is-good culture - will be soon.
    But the backroom deal lives on and, in an orgy of cronyism,
billions of dollars are being carved up in no-bid contracts awarded to
politically-connected firms for work in the hurricane-hit states and in
Iraq.
    The war, seen as unwinnable, is becoming a bleak burden, with
nearly 2,000 American dead. Two-thirds think the invasion was a
mistake.
    The war costs $6 billion a month, driving up a nose-bleed high $331
billion budget deficit. In five years the conflict will have cost each
American family $11,300, it is said.
    Mr Bush says blithely he'll cut existing programmes to pay for the
war and fund an estimated $200 billion for hurricane damage. He won't,
he says, rescind his tax cuts. Republican Senator Chuck Hagel says Mr
Bush is "disconnected from reality".
    Americans have been angered by a reports that US troops have
routinely tortured Iraqi prisoners. Some 230 low-rankers have been
convicted - but not one general or Pentagon overseer. Disgruntled young
officers are leaving in increasing numbers.
    Meanwhile, further damaging Americans' self image, there's
Afghanistan. The White House says its operations there were a success,
yet last year Afghanistan supplied 90 per cent of the world's heroin.
    America's sense of itself - its pride in its power and authority,
its faith in its institutions and its belief in its leaders - has been
profoundly damaged. And now the talking heads in Washington predict
dramatic political change and the death of the Republicans' hope of
becoming the permanent government. 

--
What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless,
whether 
the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or in
the holy 
name of liberty and democracy?: Mohandas Gandhi. 

 
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