Okay, here's my edit of Phil's argument...
Love & Liberty,
((( starchild )))
Compassion and caring happen. As a blind and partially disabled senior who still gets out and about, I “see” it on a regular basis as strangers help me find my way.
On Muni and elsewhere in San Francisco I also encounter the desperation of disability, poverty, disease. Somehow this misery remains, despite armies of social workers and trillions of dollars in U.S. government spending over many decades.
I’ve availed myself of some of those services and usually found the providers competent and caring. Yet as a system it falls short. Why is there still so much misery? How can we try something different?
A few years ago, my aunt took me to visit my grandfather’s grave in the Workman’s Cemetery. This resting place was the legacy of the Workmanship Circle, a society of Jewish anarchist Marxists formed to provide a safety net for its members through voluntary mutual aid. The cemetery was just one of the stitches in that net. Overlapping it were other Jewish community groups, families, friends, neighbors. Together they helped each other through the Great Depression and well into the 1950s.
Sadly, these voluntary societies in American life were gradually pushed aside and displaced by the growing top-down government welfare system. For many of the folks I encounter on the N and the 43, that system has failed, and I doubt adding more bureaucracy as Prop. I does will help.
Perhaps it’s time to start knitting a new web of safety nets — one person, one family, one block, one neighborhood, one place of worship, one social club, one political club, one makers’ club at a time, where people support each other as brothers and sisters in communities of mutual respect and responsibility.
Please vote NO on Prop I, and start knitting!
Phil Berg
Libertarian Party of San Francisco