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05/09/2003 Archived Entry: "We've lost our security blanket"

WE'VE LOST OUR SECURITY BLANKET

I don't talk about this subject very often, but I sure think about it a lot.

Our basic foundations on which we have long relied are suffering. The whole system is being gutted. It has taken a long time for people to realize what happens to programs we hold dear when you cut taxes and build a military empire. Our lives aren't improving despite a brilliant public relations campaign to convince us otherwise. The jigs up!

This was once again brought to mind when I thought about what President Bush really meant when he promised to "leave no child behind". What that says is that he set standards that break the back of our educational system yet he failed to fund the program for school districts in his 2003 and 2004 budgets. It can make dedicated teachers angry enough to quit.

Among other industrial nations, the mortality rate for our children under age five is shared by Croatia and Malaysia. We are 54th down the line when it comes to access to health care for women and children. When it comes to taking care of mothers and children, we don't even rank in the top ten of all the industrialized nations in the world. That is simply deplorable and Bush made it all possible. I won't even get into what he did to family planning programs, AIDS support and women's issues that will only compound the problems we already have.

We don't even rank high in our domestic national security. That should now be obvious.

Last night I attended a meeting where members were asked what we'd do if we were President Bush for a day. We could only mention one thing and we had to be nice, however, my list was endless. I chose to say that I would see to it that every child in the world was fed and none went to bed hungry.

No one else even came close to thinking about the world's children. One man did say he would "take care of our own", but neglected to realize our global society doesn't allow us to separate "us" from "them". Most of the respondents had tax fixes. Several honed in on the environment and heath care. Good for them. If we take care of our children, everything else will follow, but we are not taking care of our children.

Our schools are all experiencing the same critical situations with teacher layoffs and program cut backs. They use euphemistic terms for this to make us feel better. Teachers who remain will have more students and less time to teach, more competency tests to teach to. We can see our schools precariously balanced on the brink of financial insolvency. What we want for our children is slowly being taken away from us. We struggle to hang on for what we have.

We once had a blanket under mothers with small children, the ill and infirm, the elderly and the unemployed. It was called the New Deal and has been in place for almost as many years as I am old. The rhetoric of compassionate conservatism has unraveled this social contract with our citizens. It erodes the sense of the common good. It places everything we have known to balance our social order in jeopardy. We exchange this for tax cuts targeted to the wealthy. Not all of us are wearing blinders.

We need strong public schools, programs for women and children, health insurance for families, home health care for our elderly, Social Security, strong systems of public education and higher education, and reinforcement of our infrastructure. If we don't protect the organism on which we live, we will no longer have a place to live.

Once Bush decided to strengthen our military and create tax cuts, it just wrecked havoc on all our public institutions and programs. We'll lose more of it if we don't act soon.