Human cost of
the wolf philosophy

Book pages 97-99

The personal encounter with the constant whining, restlessness, and snotty noses of those children who cry incessantly because they go to bed hungry, seems almost a relief and infinitely preferable to the empty eyes and dead silence of those children whom hunger has made so apathetic that they are no longer able to cry.
 

I wonder if anyone can really imagine how such a hunger throughout history has been stamped into the mind of black America.
 

What effect does it have upon the soul of a people who must look on all the time as mothers relinquish their children to the grave?
 

Or see mothers die at a brutal rate: 13,600 black women yearly die in childbirth. Only 3,481 would die if they had access to white health care and fewer than 2,000 if they had Scandinavian health care.
 

And what shall the rest of the world think of a society which spends billions of dollars on rolling steel gadgets while condemning its children to rank only 15th lowest in child mortality, letting 17,686 babies die unnecessarily in 1977?
 

What doesn't it reveal about the priorities of that society, that it has fenced in the automobile cemetery in the background, but not the human cemetery in the foreground?
 

Priorities that for instance permitted General Motors to buy up and destroy the electric trolley systems in American cities in 1936 in order to sell more cars - a conspiracy for which GM's chairman was only fined $1.00 (one!) by a federal court, though it trapped Americans forever in concrete spaghetti mazes, like that of Los Angeles, which eventually caused 500 deaths a year from its annual 460,000 tons of car pollutants.
 

Invisible for most people, the laws of our system constantly manipulate the individual.
 

We get in the incessant Horatio Alger propaganda, with stories about Rockefeller and "the self-made man," a lesson in the possibility of success.

The enormous amount of poverty and suffering necessary to create a Rockefeller is left out of the picture.
 

The road to success is portrayed as a road with obstacles which a determined man with the necessary qualities can overcome.
 

The reward is waiting in the distance.
 

The road is lonesome and in order to achieve success one must adopt qualities like a wolf: eat or be eaten, for one can only succeed at the cost of the failure of others.
 

 

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