I think that if this is true, we do not do a very good job of it. We are not efficient and we are not effective. We have embarrassing health care statistics and we have embarrassing childhood poverty rates. In every city all over the country, we have large numbers of homeless, mentally ill and even more people are marginalized and cannot live on our “minimum wage” established by a congress that makes sure that it has health care and enough of an income so that they do not have to work for the rest of their life – once a senator or member of the house of representatives.
We live in a country where if you do not have health insurance and you get cancer, you will probably die. We live in a country where the established minimum wage is not enough to rent a property to live in. All around us families continue to lose their homes to foreclosure because of a ravaged bank system decimated by crooks who are now living on tropical islands.
I am not saying that my country is a bad country; I can hear in the back of my head the old veterans saying “if you don’t like it here, get out of the country and go somewhere else.” I am not saying that this country is inherently bad. What I am saying is that we do not do a great job with money and its relationship to humanity.
In our country it takes money for people to live, it takes money for humans to survive in the USA.
The other thing I hear on the radio is a lot of advertisement for charities. At ____ department store, you can buy perfume and 1% will be donated to your favorite charity. When I hear this I am very frustrated – the reason being – is that I think if you want to give – you should do it person to person, to buy yourself something extravagant and to think that pennies will go to a charity somewhere, from you, is nothing more than a hedonist’s guilt assuaged by falsity. You cannot spend $100 on yourself with a leftover profit going to a charity and actually believe you have done something good – it is just not real.
So back to efficiency and effectiveness in the good old USA: we must do better. We are a great country founded on independence and freedom and we must now be a great country known for its great ability to be humane. We must go the next step, we cannot pound our chest about our accomplishments when malnutrition and childhood poverty and homelessness exist here! We simply cannot! We have the money, we just need to use it more effectively and efficiently, if we truly are the most generous country in the world, let’s make it count for something.
