Sometimes I think that it’s difficult, if not impossible, for people who don’t actually have to interface with the system on a life-and-death basis, from a disadvantaged position, to really understand the extent to which it is broken and demands human sacrifices just to continue. More and more, the rich, and I daresay much of the middle-class, seem like sailors on a ship set adrift, who are waiting for the weak and sick to die, or at least not be strong enough to fight back, so they can steal their water ration. Is this the society in which we want to reside? I think of an acquaintance who recently saw her son, an innocent victim of gun violence, go from a healthy teenager to a victim fighting for his life, facing a future of total paralysis below the chest and who knows how many other health problems. What does the future hold for him? Or for my children, who depend on a number of expensive medications and treatments just to survive a chronic illness? Or for the homeless youngsters that I see at the Rescue Mission? Or the students I know who have been priced out of an education or reduced to debt slaves with an indeterminate indenture. Meanwhile, banks and financial institutions across the world get billions in public money, while the unemployment lines get longer. We feed the Rich Man, but Lazarus still goes hungry, and no one tends his sores.
