Everywhere pundits and observers of the American scene decry the fall in trust of institutions. Larger and larger swathes of us feel a growing loss of control; between a massive pandemic that killed over a short time about a million Americans – Americans!! the most well-served people in the world – and the arrival of artificial intelligence along with something called algorithms, there appears a slow withdrawal into a sort of national cocoon. If I could insert here – no tech skills, sorry – a picture of a big-eyed animal peering suspiciously from out of a den of some sort, that would convey what I think we are seeing around us.
The person who listened sympathetically to a frightened older person worried about predatory lenders and and the side-effects of the medications their doctors give them, is now filled with a fear of those same people for their vote for Trump.
Nothing has shown us more clearly the precipitousness of the decline in trust than the willingness of almost half the voters to turn the country over to a TV host – oh, wait a minute. The citizens of Ukraine did that and it turned out well in their hour of need. But nothing shows any such outcome for the U.S. This decline in trust – and here is where knowledgeable persons might set me straight – began with the figure of Ronald Reagan telling us that government is the problem. More exactly he added: for now; but almost everyone leaves that qualification out.
The result has been a shift to the right but not so much toward the standard conservative mantra of things were better in the old days but more toward ‘we need a businessman in the White House’.
Trump is no businessman but he fits right in. The difference is that he will do anything for money. As bad as that sounds, there have been a steady stream of our servants in Congress willing to gradually unravel all the safe-guards built by the two Roosevelts and this was done in service to the banks and corporations the same as it was done over a century ago. After that, more safe-guards were put in by New Dealers and their heirs, much to the disgust of Republicans.
But with all that. something shifted that even New Dealers like Johnson and Biden could not turn around. It is now taken for granted that lobbyists – having burgeoned over the last 30 years or so – will now write our laws. So why not put enemies of environmental preservation in as heads of the agencies designed to preserve the envrionment?
So the formula is clear: business gives money to politicians to promote the needs and desires of business and the politicians oblige and people feel the effects like the price of medical care, of insurance, of housing, of taxation, of gas, of food, and are beginning to despair. They react.
Was someone supposed to intervene somewhere, sometime?
I listen to statistics on healthcare. They are poor. All of my friends get good medical care. What’s wrong? A lot of people aren’t my friends and live miles from a clinic and a good distance from even a supermarket. Those who live close can afford neither the medicine nor the food. That’s the problem: unequal distribution. Statistics on healthcare have to be set side by side with statistics on who has money. Int he 60s my mother worked in the Indian Health Office and directed to me doctors from other countries which had populations similar to those on our reservations. Since I knew they were hosted by White doctors and administrators, I took them to South Phoenix to show them not all poor people in this country lived on reservations.