Category

Society

Even if we act to erase material poverty, there is another greater task, it is to confront the poverty of satisfaction - purpose and dignity - that afflicts us all.
Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over 800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product - if we judge the United States of America by that - that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts [serial killer] Whitman’s rifle and [serial killer] Speck’s knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.
Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.
If this is true here at home, so it is true elsewhere in world.

Robert F. Kennedy
April 18, 2020

Two months on, that anxiety has not gone, although it’s also been joined by a sense of sadness. It’s now clear that so many people have died, and so many more are desperately ill, simply because our politicians refused to listen to and act on advice. Scientists like us said lock down earlier; we said test, trace, isolate. But they decided they knew better.

Helen Ward (epidemiologist, London School of Public Health)
April 16, 2020

Only now, hopefully not too late, we are beginning to understand that all that stands between us and the plague’s most horrifying effects is good government, something which we have sought to destroy for some decades, deriding it, dismissing it, downsizing it, underfunding it, and, as witnessed when the Morrison government returned to power, hectoring and bullying it.
And so we reap our bitter harvest.
A system of thought, an idea of the state, a way of running nations, a grossly unequal economy, all that began 40 years ago with Margaret Thatcher’s declaration that there is no such thing as society, must end with the way we respond to this deadly virus.

Richard Flanagan
March 28, 2020