Investing in Our Future

A recent U.N. report comparing the well-being of children in 21 industrialized countries started with the quote “The true measure of a nation’s standing is how well it attends to its children – their health and safety, their material security, their education and socialization, and their sense of being loved, valued, and included in the families and societies into which they are born.”

The 52 page report found that the United States was next to last and last was the mother country that still engages in such nonsense as the divine right of kings and queens by blood – theirs as well as the blood of others shed to convince those less fortunate to believe in an illusion of grandeur or else.

While we don’t have a monarchy here we still have the same attachment to superior/subordinate relationships between man and government by any means necessary where the few define and impose their definition of reality at the expense of the many.

Indeed we have convinced ourselves of our claims that the children are our future even while millions of American children reflect a different reality one where they have no health insurance, are abused, neglected, left unsupervised to participate in such behavior as smoking, drinking, drugs, violence, unprotected sex, etc.

Programs and policies which were proven to reduce social problems were reduced themselves from acceptance by the conservatives description of reality to the compassionate legislating of federal tax cuts that further decreased state revenues resulting in cuts to child care programs including but not limited to health care assistance.

In addition our perpetual war on terrorism produces a perpetual need to produce state of the art weaponry and perpetual profits to those who invested in creating our newest/latest weapons that inflict searing pain without killing or even without permanently hurting the targets and a long-range acoustic device that emits sound waves which cause excruciating ear pain without damaging eardrums.

Each testament to modern technology run amok in the empire avoids collateral damage yet such addiction to violence isn’t cheap and without raising taxes social programs are the logical choice to sacrifice their budgets and by default it is children who will become collateral damage in order for men to fight other men to the death for this cause or that, this flag or that, this god or that, etc.

Last week a corporate news report mentioned a significant increase in binge drinking by college students and mixing alcohol with prescription drugs. If our children are our future perhaps they just might be trying to numb themselves further from the unpleasant reality that our government has no problem finding 2 billion dollars a week to finance the 21st century crusades because it is the children, our children and not the children of the well off who will have to pay for it with blood and treasure in the future and that future is now.