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Chapter 17
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And what shall the
rest of the world think of a society
which has fenced in the automobile graveyard, but not the human
cemetery - spending
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? I don't have the most
recent figures, but suppose a terrorist blew up 17,686 American
babies. Such a terrorist is the "pro-life" Republican party which
has been fighting tooth and nail all efforts to give Americans the
same free national health care which other countries take for
granted. |
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The bombardment of commercials for cars and materialism
continually lowers our sensitivity for human values and makes us blind to the
suffering all around us. People in the North talk about poverty in the South, but are
unable to see it in the ghettos around the corner - or right outside campus.
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Such blindness I saw in Mississippi when I hitchhiked through a
community of flooded shacks and drowned mules with a driver, who expounded at
great length on how this is a country with opportunities for everybody.
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"Anyone", he declared, "can become a millionaire in 10 years.
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If you have the strength and desire you can pull yourself up
from the dirt by your own bootstraps."
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Meanwhile we could see people sitting on the tin roofs of their
shacks while destitute tenant farmers fished in boats for the only thing they
owned, a drowned mule!
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The ideological blinding which leaves people to "row their own
boats" is upheld through a persistent bombardment of appeals to our selfishness
and greediness.
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The laws of our system, invisible for most people, constantly
manipulate us with stories about a Rockefeller's or a Bill Gates' success.
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The enormous poverty and suffering necessary to create a
Rockefeller is left out of the picture.
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The road to success is portrayed as one with obstacles which a
determined man with the necessary qualities can overcome.
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The reward is waiting in the distance.
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The road is lonesome and to succeed one must be like a wolf: eat or be eaten, for one can only succeed at the cost or the
failure of others.
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