This Is What It's Come to

Irony doesn't come close to describing what is now transpiring in American society, from education to health care.
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So this is what it's come to. In the 1950's blacks in the South sued schools because white segregationists were excluding black children from attending their pseudo-private public schools. Now, in 2007, white families sue schools for including blacks and other minorities, for trying to prevent the re-segregation of American schools.

So we think we've made progress? It's the same segregated society as fifty years ago, only worse in the banality of its evil. In this age of Paris Hilton, the great economic divide is actually "good," the unmitigated result of the free market working as it should, producing great wealth for the few with the extra minor annoyance of great poverty for the many and, yes, great mediocrity for everyone in between who live under the illusion of prosperity.

We have great schools for the fortunate few who are lucky enough to be born to the right parents and in the right neighborhoods, and terrible schools -- or more accurately, terribly deprived schools -- for those children who were unlucky enough to be born to the wrong parents and in the wrong neighborhoods.

In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court realized it couldn't do much about racial segregation in the society at large, but it could do something about pseudo-private schooling in our allegedly public schools. And the historic result was Brown v. Board of Education, the single most important legal event in the past half-century for integrating blacks into the fabric of the American enterprise.

Now, the U.S. Supreme Court, led by the great Orwellian orator Chief Justice John Roberts, tells us that, in the name of Brown v. Board of Education, the best way to stop racial discrimination is to "stop discriminating by race." Our society may not be colorblind, but our Constitution is. Therefore, local governments in Seattle, Louisville and elsewhere can't even think about race when crafting policies to attack racially segregated schools, lest they run afoul of the Constitution's equal protection clause.

Justice Stephen Breyer, in his brave dissent to Roberts's majority ruling, called his colleagues' invocation of Brown to legitimize racially segregated schools a "cruel irony."

But irony doesn't come close to describing what is now transpiring in American society, from education to health care.

In Brown v. Board of Education, it was the disadvantaged who were victims. Now, the privileged classes are the victims. They're suing schools for trying to block a road that leads us nowhere good, to a segregated system that keeps the "good" kids safe from the society's caste-offs. We'll keep the untouchables in educational holding cells until they enter the America prison system or get shipped off to Iraq.

In Michael Moore's latest film, Sicko, he shows how our corrupt system of profit-driven health insurance discards human beings like so many cattle. The question is, Moore asks, why do Americans put up with this shit? What prevents us from doing for our people what every other advanced democracy seems capable of providing for their citizens? Why do big media and big politicians roll out the proverbial anti-socialist rhetoric every time we broach the subject of universal health care like that provided by other democracies in Canada and Europe?

The operative word here is democracy. Some countries got it and some don't.

France has universal health care because France is a democracy. Britain has universal health care because Britain is a democracy. America's alleged business and political leaders spurn those models because the United States, circa 2007, is not a democracy. As Moore suggests in Sicko, we're not a democracy because fear rules our lives. Fear of losing our jobs. Fear of making a fuss. So we hand our power to a system that fuels fear and rules by fear.

Instead of democracy, we have Big Pharma and Big HMOs that skim excessive profits from the fearful hearts of bleeding American people. But the "cruel irony," as Justice Breyer might call it, is that the rich and powerful, with the help of a compliant media, have managed to convince the weak and powerless that the privileged are the real victims. As the vanguards of America's health care system -- "the best in the world" -- it's they who are the unfortunate objects of overzealous government power and screwy socialist ideas.

In the past I've been accused of inciting class warfare whenever I bring up these inconvenient truths. In the past, I've not responded to those provocations, because, as Britain, Canada, and France have shown in their systems of democratic health care, a country doesn't need class warfare to creatively solve problems with practical solutions that help ordinary people.

But the class war has already begun, my friends. As Moore shows, powerful entities with the most to lose from democracy have long been engaged in a war of ideology that keeps us fearful and keeps us bleeding.

Our inept political leadership won't stand up to these powerful interests, so ordinary people must. Ordinary people need to take a break from Paris, Dale Earnhard t and American Idol, and stand up. If that's class warfare, then I say, bring it on.

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