Often here in the states, we ponder as people are prone to do when things have gone so horribly utterly wrong -- where did it all begin? what was the moment, the incident, that set us on this path?
We can trace threads of this bad thing back to the Nixon era or threads of another hideous trend back to the depression era, but where did it coalesce? Very often, people point to this speech as the moment, the turning point, the articulation of "are you" rather than "are we." Maybe we can eventually make language a complete impediment to understanding. -Hobbes
"Katrina the aftermath is payback time for decades of stupidity, greed, pillage, racism," writes Alexander Cockburn at Counterpunch. "My thought is that the tempo towards catastrophe really picked up in the Reagan era. That's when the notion of this society being in some deep sense a collective effort, pointed towards universal human betterment the core of the old Enlightenment went onto the trash heap. "Once you stop believing in universal betterment, you stop investing in social defenses, like health care, or flood control. You build your shining condo on the hill, put a fence round it, and cancel the local bus service so the poor can't get at you... "So collective effort goes out the window, and soon the society forgets how collective effort works. Tens of thousands of poor people standing on roofs in the Delta and they haven't the slightest idea how to get them off. The ones they have brought to dry land they dump on the highway, where they stand as the Army trucks roll by."
"Once you stop believing in universal betterment, you stop investing in social defenses, like health care, or flood control. You build your shining condo on the hill, put a fence round it, and cancel the local bus service so the poor can't get at you...
"So collective effort goes out the window, and soon the society forgets how collective effort works. Tens of thousands of poor people standing on roofs in the Delta and they haven't the slightest idea how to get them off. The ones they have brought to dry land they dump on the highway, where they stand as the Army trucks roll by."
