Sometimes it's the simplest things that will trigger a thought. Yesterday I was watching TV and an ad came on for bottled water. It really struck me as odd. Our founders put to paper that Americans should have access to life, liberty, and happiness. And here we are charging people for something it is essential to life, water. We have crippled our system so much that we now sell bottled water. Now, I could point out that this is capitalism run amuck, but that would be too great and clear of an observation. When in fact, that seems to be more or less, what America is founded on.
There is a call to help the homeless, but when there is no profit to be made from it, they are left to their own devices, to survive on their own. However, in the few special occasions that they find shelter, if a developer comes in with a fistful of greenbacks, those homeless people are tossed back out onto the streets, while what they once called home is remodeled into an upscale suite of apartments.
Everyone wants to protect the children. You have scores of people protesting outside of abortion clinics. Yet when it comes time and those children need services such as WIC or food stamps, the very crowd that once vowed to protect them when they were a fetus turns against them with great fury, and calls them moochers, sponges off of society. And if they live in a poor neighborhood awash in crime, little is done to invest in that neighborhood. That is unless, you call private prisons an investment. And that's nothing more to profit by keeping people, mostly African-American and Latino-American, in prison be decreeing harsh sentences and coming up with ways to ensure they end up incarcerated. And you thought slavery was something only in history books.
Health care. If you want to be healthy and live a long life, you must pay for the privilege.
We have for profit prison systems. Water, a natural resource, is now bottled because our country is held back by a political party that doesn't see investing in clean, safe water as a priority. It is if an unforeseen side effect of unchecked capitalism is the profiting off of suffering. Anytime you try to point out these flaws, you're branded a socialist or worse. That serves to only keep us stuck going in circles.
Let's be blunt, there is no perfect system, no matter how much someone tries to frame it. We must awaken ourselves to the reality that unchecked capitalism as grown into a raging beast that is out of control. We need laws to keep businesses in check, offering real punishment when they price gouge. Laws that make them think twice about layoffs and uprooting operations so they could avoid such pesky things as paying people a livable wage. Laws that for once and all say that keeping people in prison should not be a for profit business. There is a lot that we must open our eyes to in this country, because these are times of peril. And under we can correct the course we're on, we're just doomed to repeat the same mistakes.
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