Attempt Two

My recent post titled Star Trek's Glaring Plot Hole is an attempt to talk about something I don't really have words for. I guess this is attempt two.

A nation is a group of people and a country is a group of people plus the LANDS they occupy. 

I'm a social creature. I have a people first mentality.

When I enthusiastically bought $300 worth of books for a kind of Urban Planning self study course from my sickbed, it included books on social bits like education not typically included as part of Urban Planning which is viewed as being about the built environment.

To have a healthy society, you absolutely must have a healthy social fabric. Society is about people first.

Hypothetically -- and I don't actually know because I've never lived this way and I don't know of any groups actually really still living this way in the modern world and making it work -- tribal cultures where the tribe owned the land inherently related fundamentally differently to the land in ways that shaped the social fabric into something more egalitarian.

The US, which is my country, has both some of the best medical care in the world and some of the worst at the same time because of how we monetize it.

Historically, we were an extremely wealthy country and if you can afford it, we have some of the best medical care available on the planet. At the same time, we do an atrocious job of actually taking care of our people.

Public health is a public good and we treat health care as a private commercial transaction. When you don't let poor people see a doctor because they can't pay, their diseases don't remain their problem. Other people get sick too.

The quiet little hepatitis A epidemic in the US began in the homeless population in San Diego and spread from there. It wasn't only homeless people who got sick.

So there's something about how the world handles things but especially the US where there's no floor which fuels a Red Queen Effect because well-off individuals are so terrified of the lack of a safety net that no amount of money is ever "enough." 

So while the world endlessly pushes for raising the ceiling, it actively makes quality of life overall worse for everyone because we have no stability and no security and it actively promotes class warfare and the rich get richer and crazier and the poor get poorer and more resentful.

And inclusion and exclusion from the fruits of society is rooted in a paradigm that actively fuels antisocial, problematic behaviors where you increasingly need cash in hand for all kinds of basic essentials like bathroom access that wasn't a giant political discussion in the news when I was a child.

Women were more likely to be homemakers and if a guy was working at stereotypical manly jobs like trucking or farming or any number of things that involve travel or being outdoors and he needed to pee, he peed on a tree and no one went OMG! about it. And you go pee a lot more than poo, so this wasn't a crisis for men who have the equipment to whip it out and discreetly take a leak in circumstances where there were generally fewer people around and most people didn't live in the city and so no one freaked out about it.

And now most people live in cities and there's a global bathroom crisis where commercial establishments lock their bathrooms up and you need to ask for access to the bathroom. They give you a key or unlock it for you or tell you the key code.

And it's insane because we have rising homelessness. Homeless people are the poorest of the poor and they are both likely to be poor because they have health problems and to have health problems because they are poor.

When extremely poor people with health problems urinate and defecate on city streets because they lack bathroom access, this is a public health threat. It promotes disease for everyone. It's not just harming homeless people.

And people the world over seem incapable of thinking of any means whatsoever to include people in the good life without throwing money at the problem. And when you throw money at the problem, all of society goes down the tubes, slow but sure.

If you made electricity free to everyone, you wouldn't be able to build electric companies fast enough to keep up with demand. It's called the tragedy of the commons: if you give it away, everyone wants as much as they can get forever.

So I try to find solutions that are inclusive and rights based without bleeding society for money. And excludes them for actively behaving badly rather than for poverty.

I try to come up with solutions where if the world worked this way and you lost absolutely everything and you were homeless, you would still have bathroom access without it being a crisis and could still get enough to eat and have adequate hygiene so poverty didn't destroy your health and become an inescapable trap.

And in theory this makes it easier for middle class and upper class people to perform stewardship of public goods like their jobs are supposed to provide instead of having a COMPLETELY pathetic billionaire US president starting wars to make his morally bankrupt scum relatives wealthier from the misery of other people.

Which is an insane recipe because currently people like Donald Trump ACTIVELY shrink the economic pie while taking a larger than fair share and if you continue down that road long enough you end up with The Lion King scenario where the country is in absolute ruins and no one has a nice life.

If you actually want to be sustainably RICH, you need to look out for the welfare of the people because that's where wealth comes from.

And I don't have the language I want for these ideas because this is currently an alien way of thinking for planet Earth. So I'm trying to invent language for what I'm trying to do here.

Footnote 

I have added tags to this: American Experiment and Native.

The "American Experiment" of idealistic democracy was stolen from the Haudenosaunee but we didn't steal their legal relationship to real estate. And that's probably a primary reason the US is such a mess. And this is kind of an emergent idea for ME so I want it here for ME, but if someone reads this, I'm probably not saying whatever insane conclusion you want to leap to.