Gay rights, drug law reform, health care reform..
Sometimes I get discouraged – I see so many broken things, so many cases of people oppressing other people for profit or “because God told me to”, and I just want to give up and curl up in a little ball and hide.
But, this story reminds me that things are actually getting better. In 1974, race officials tried to bodily remove a runner from the Boston marathon.. because she was a woman. In 1967, you couldn’t marry someone who wasn’t of the same race you were. And in 1920, you couldn’t vote unless you were male.
I look forward to the day when our children, or grandchildren, look back at capitolism the way we look back at slavery – when people are mostly puzzled by our refusal to let gays marry – when people have designed a government that can’t turn on it’s citizens and lock them up for “moral offenses” like recreational drug use – things that don’t hurt anyone else, and in many cases don’t even hurt the offender.
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A thought, by the way, for all of you resisting nationalized health care – a nationalized phone system brought you the transistor. Right now it’s very much not in the economic interests of the powers that be to cure diseases – they can make far more money treating them. But – if you measure in terms of wealth of humanity as a whole, instead of wealth of particular stockholders, clearly every infectious disease known to man should be eradicated. Human health care needs many Xerox parcs, many bell labs – groups of brilliant people who are encouraged to create the best things they can, with the wealth of the race as their primary interest rather than the wealth of a individual company.
May 19th, 2009 at 1:20 pm
This is not to say that the Bell system didn’t have it’s problems – their refusal to allow any equipment they didn’t lease you themselves be connected to their network would be one obvious one. But we owe a lot to the Bell system – it did a lot of things that a privatized phone system could not have done.
May 20th, 2009 at 8:55 am
Agree!