I've been watching the dramatizations of Charles Dickens novels on PBS. There was Oliver Twist, in two installments; and more recently, The Old Curiosity Shop.
Dickens depicts a world—early 19th century London—with a lot of poverty and ruthless social conditions, like prisons and workhouses for the poor or for people who don't pay their debts.
In addition to this background, which anyone would find depressing, Dickens' characters are a great bunch of scoundrels--liars, cheats, robbers, even killers. So it's a sordid, vicious society full of vicious individuals with no scruples.
You want to say, Thank God I don't live in that world! At least on the surface our world seems to be more humane and less draconian. But human nature has not changed. If you look at the news, and see the dealings of politicians and bankers and Wall Street traders—there are still plenty of scoundrels in the world. It might be just as dismal to contemplate our world. After all, Dickens' world is fictional, and we may well let ourselves believe that Dickens' time and place was not as bad as he depicted it to be.
Copyright © 2011 by Richard Stein
Showing posts with label poverty. Show all posts
Showing posts with label poverty. Show all posts
Friday, September 16, 2011
Thursday, September 15, 2011
Mississippi: Not Exactly Paradise
Mississippi is a very backward state. It ranks last among all US states in so many things, like educational levels, obesity, and percentage of people who smoke.
According to an article in 247wallstreet.com,
I'm always saying that people who think they should not pay taxes or who don't like government programs that help the poor should go live in Mississippi. It's the very opposite of a country like Norway, where the taxes are very high but the government provides nearly everything anyone wants or needs. (That all sounds good to me, but it's what conservative Americans call "socialism," and socialism is felt by these same people to be a very damning epithet.)
Mississippi also has been a state with poor racial equality and a lot of bigotry and intolerance in general. It's the state where three civil rights workers from the North—two white and one black—were murdered in 1963. It's also the state where a young black teenager from Chicago was brutally murdered for allegedly whistling at a white woman. (His killers were acquitted by an all-white jury, and later admitted their guilt but could not be retried because of the US legal protection against "double jeopardy.")
At about that time I visited Mississippi myself, and I said to myself at the time, "If ever there's a place that looks like it's been cursed by God, this is it." Driving from Mississippi into next-door Alabama, Alabama looks like paradise--but that's only by comparison.
All this was nearly 50 years ago. That's quite a while, and some things might have changed. Quite possibly you can no longer get away with killing black people there. Still, I think that Mississippi was always basically an agrarian state, with its economy based on slavery. It never recovered from the Civil War and the direct ravages of that war, and the emancipation of the slaves. When I was there, 100 years after the Civil War, it was still a very blighted-looking place. And we see that today, 150 years after the Civil War, it's still very poor.
Mississippi's very poor material and economic welfare and its poor education doubtless go hand-in-hand. The two are inextricably related. Poor education is a cause of poor prosperity, and lack of tax receipts to pay for education in turn will result in poor education, so the two mutually reinforce one another.
Also, people's attitudes have a lot to do with their level of education. Mississippi may very well continue to have backward racial and other attitudes due to its lack of education.
Another state that lately has been much in the news with things like wanting to teach Creationism in its schools instead of evolution and passing anti-gay laws, is Tennessee. In the same 247wallstreet.com article, Tennessee ranks as the third-poorest state. Other notably backward states like West Virginia and Kentucky also ranked among the 10 poorest.
Read more: America’s Poorest States - 24/7 Wall St. http://247wallst.com/2011/09/14/americas-poorest-states/#ixzz1Y3KNnMyJ
Copyright © 2011 by Richard Stein
According to an article in 247wallstreet.com,
In nearly every metric associated with poverty, education, employment, health risk, and insurance coverage, Mississippi has been close to the bottom for years.
I'm always saying that people who think they should not pay taxes or who don't like government programs that help the poor should go live in Mississippi. It's the very opposite of a country like Norway, where the taxes are very high but the government provides nearly everything anyone wants or needs. (That all sounds good to me, but it's what conservative Americans call "socialism," and socialism is felt by these same people to be a very damning epithet.)
Mississippi also has been a state with poor racial equality and a lot of bigotry and intolerance in general. It's the state where three civil rights workers from the North—two white and one black—were murdered in 1963. It's also the state where a young black teenager from Chicago was brutally murdered for allegedly whistling at a white woman. (His killers were acquitted by an all-white jury, and later admitted their guilt but could not be retried because of the US legal protection against "double jeopardy.")
At about that time I visited Mississippi myself, and I said to myself at the time, "If ever there's a place that looks like it's been cursed by God, this is it." Driving from Mississippi into next-door Alabama, Alabama looks like paradise--but that's only by comparison.
All this was nearly 50 years ago. That's quite a while, and some things might have changed. Quite possibly you can no longer get away with killing black people there. Still, I think that Mississippi was always basically an agrarian state, with its economy based on slavery. It never recovered from the Civil War and the direct ravages of that war, and the emancipation of the slaves. When I was there, 100 years after the Civil War, it was still a very blighted-looking place. And we see that today, 150 years after the Civil War, it's still very poor.
Mississippi's very poor material and economic welfare and its poor education doubtless go hand-in-hand. The two are inextricably related. Poor education is a cause of poor prosperity, and lack of tax receipts to pay for education in turn will result in poor education, so the two mutually reinforce one another.
Also, people's attitudes have a lot to do with their level of education. Mississippi may very well continue to have backward racial and other attitudes due to its lack of education.
Another state that lately has been much in the news with things like wanting to teach Creationism in its schools instead of evolution and passing anti-gay laws, is Tennessee. In the same 247wallstreet.com article, Tennessee ranks as the third-poorest state. Other notably backward states like West Virginia and Kentucky also ranked among the 10 poorest.
Read more: America’s Poorest States - 24/7 Wall St. http://247wallst.com/2011/09/14/americas-poorest-states/#ixzz1Y3KNnMyJ
Copyright © 2011 by Richard Stein
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