Poor America.

Well I just watched, via the medium of SKY+, a show that has left me almost speechless. Panorama is a marvellous investigative show here and whilst I don’t watch every edition, I do try to see it whenever I can though but the one I just saw has, like I said, left me stunned.

The focus was on the growing amount of poor and destitute people in America. Now I know that there’s at least one American that reads this so I would just like to apologise in advance for what I suspect will turn into a rant or attack on the U.S.A! I still, for the life of me, cannot get my head around the lack of a welfare state in what is the richest country on the planet. The first duty of a society is to look after all of it’s citizens and that includes the poorest among them. By no means do I promote the idea of a system that allows people to be feckless or work-shy but to have a country that allows 1% of it’s population to garner most of the wealth and leaving the rest to flail around seems just plain wrong. Having been on unemployment benefit myself, I know for a fact that no-one wants to be on the dole forever but it can be habit forming in that one can get into a rut. However to have healthy economy it is inherent that we have a system that caters for people when they are out of work and helps them back into employment. To just cast people adrift is a crime and one that affects not just the person concerned but their family and the wider community.

I’ll provide a link to the show at the end of this but there was one bit that simultaneously brought tears my eyes as well as made me damned angry. A group what I think were elementary school kids in a deprived area were talking about their homelife. Some didn’t eat every day, some lived in areas were there were murders and others were clearly experiencing developmental problems, borne out of the poverty they were in. one girl, and I promise this is true, you can see it for yourself in the show, said she and her mum had to eat rats some days. That’s people, eating vermin in a supposedly civilised country. I like America but, what the hell is going on? That’s something that would wind me up had it been a street urchin in a Delhi slum but to see a kid in Detroit (I think) say that boils my blood. I know there’s the issue of personal reasonability and people should take charge o their own lives BUT there has to be a helping hand for the most vulnerable in society.

There was also an interview with an older couple in a free clinic. The husband was told he had to get attention for a hernia and he did go to a hospital but there was told that his treatment would set him back $25000! Tied in with the welfare state is the absolute necessity of an NHS. In fact I would go so far to say the NHS is easily one of England’s greatest achievements. To have a situation where people get more and more ill and die because they can’t afford healthcare is akin to state terrorism against it’s own people. My anger reached it’s zenith when they showed a segment of the debate between the GOP candidates to run for President. They were asked what they would do if faced with a man, in need of healthcare to stop from dying but lacked insurance. None of them said they would find a way to get the state to pay. There were even members of the audience cheering them on for saying they’d allow him to die. I cannot express enough my contempt for people like that, and then Newt Gingrich, saying poor kids should be made to work as de facto child labourers? In the space of a few minutes, they confirmed that should I ever be eligible to vote in the USA, I’d cast my ballot in the Democrat box every time.

Here’s the link to the show. If you have any human decency at all, then it’ll anger and upset you too.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006t14n