I continue to badger selected members of Congress on subjects such as federal funding for public education, an increase in public health funding, the war in Iraq and the inequitable tax formula for the funding of Social Security and Medicare. (A worker with an income of $20,000 is taxed at a rate four times the rate of a person with an income of $400,000.) Please believe me, I don’t waste my time in writing or calling on Senator Frist or Representative Hastert.
I think there is another aspect of the matter that should be considered. It’s my opinion that the nation is generally afflicted with anomie and a substantial segment of society in which we have invested the most in terms of education spends its time and energy on concerns about transferring money from one pocket to another, preferably from someone else’s pocket to their own. I may have cited in a previous memo a sarcastic Quakerism “My wife and me, my son John and thee; we four and no more.” Even conservative Republicans are beginning to express dismay over the profligacy of military spending and the unconscionable tax cuts for the wealthiest people in the nation.
