Changing the channel (or maybe not) here are
some thoughts about how my values have shaped my political ideology, attitude
towards politicians, and related matters.
Among the important values I shared with,
perhaps absorbed from listening to my Uncle Lester, was a sense of social
justice; or is this an innate quality, hard-wired into my brain from birth? It
was definitely there from a very early age, implanted in my mind before I was
10, ideas, rudimentary ideologies I could discuss (albeit not very coherently) by
age 12 or 13. I clearly remember while at Brighton Public School, when I was 11
or 12 years old, feeling very firmly that some things were ‘right’ and some
were ‘wrong’ with the way society worked. Probably it was at least partly
innate, hard-wired in my brain, as described in scientific articles I mentioned
in a post on this blog on March 7, 2012. Although I talked about this with him, or
rather listened as he talked, my Uncle Lester was very tactful. He never
suggested that I should vote for left-leaning politicians when I reached voting
age; he made it clear that I must decide for myself. I think almost all other
members of my extended family were hereditary conservatives, unquestioning
supporters of the right-wing Liberal Party, which in Australia has always taken
positions well to the right of centre. Uncle Lester wasn’t of that persuasion,
and nor was I, I’m proud to say. Mostly I kept my opinions to myself while I
was a schoolboy at St Peter’s College, mainly because I was very shy, listened
a lot but said very little. I opened up a bit during my university years, and my
ideological position was firmly consolidated by my first experiences of private
fee-for-service medical practice in 1950 and 1951. The idea of taking money from people
rendered poverty stricken by chronic disability struck me as obscene and
intolerable in an affluent nation like Australia. In 1950-51 the first steps
towards tax supported payment of medical fees for old aged and invalid
pensioners hadn’t yet occurred; these patients had to fend for themselves or be
treated as charity cases. Only ex-servicemen got tax supported payment of
medical expenses (only for service-related conditions) when I graduated from medical school in December 1949. We also
had the pharmaceutical benefit system (PBS) which paid for “life-saving”
medications such as antibiotics, insulin, vaccines and other proven therapeutic
agents without which people would die or become permanently incapacitated. By
the time I got back to Adelaide in 1954 after 3 years working in the British National
Health Service, Australia had established the Pensioner Benefit System, tax
support for payment of medical and some pharmaceutical expenses incurred by old
age and invalid pensioners. I found this liberating in my dealings with these
two groups of usually financially stressed patients: I could care for them
adequately without worrying about who was paying for their care and how.
I began to doubt the familial right-of-centre
political ideology about the same time that I began to question the myths of
Christian faith, when I was a teen-ager. As a medical student I saw chronically
sick and disabled patients whose infirmities condemned them to a lifetime of
poverty. Clearly a wealthy country like Australia had a moral obligation to
provide a social and fiscal safety net. As we ate our lunches on the sandy
hillside above the beach near Yankalilla, South Australia on the day we met,
Wendy and I were talking of this, of random injustices we had seen in wealthy
countries when disability condemned families to lifelong poverty. Jan Wendy was
close to tears as she described young people, young families, whose aspirations
had been destroyed when a chance injury permanently disabled the bread-winner
and changed their family’s lives forever. I matched her stories with mine. Her
father, Pop Wendelken, had been injured twice in the Great War of 1914-1918,
patched up, returned to combat, then gassed, which caused permanently reduced
lung function and partial disability for which he received a tiny pension.
Wendy and I both perceived his fate as socially unjust: I don’t think Australia
and New Zealand should have morally blackmailed or conscripted young men to
fight in foreign wars but since they did, they surely had a moral obligation to
care for these men adequately when they were disabled by war service. In
Canada, the Harper government’s hypocrisy and weasel words of gratitude to the
young men and women whose lives were ended or blighted by the war in
Afghanistan are shameful, but predictable from such a rabidly right-wing bunch,
cut from the same cloth as the gutless ‘apology’ to victims of the residential
schools – an apology without a trace of recompense to the victims.
An even greater disgrace is marginalizing First
Nations people while failing to help them. I spoke about this at the Canadian
Public Health Association’s centennial meeting in Toronto in 2010 and posted
the text of my remarks on this blog on June 18, 2010. My talk was about the
core values – the moral values – of public health, in the context of a session
on the public health problems afflicting Canada’s First Nations. I still have a
lot of fire in my belly about this set of problems. At the CPHA meeting in
Toronto in 2010 I mentioned facts about our First Nations citizens that should
shame all affluent Canadians, especially our hypocritical elected
representatives: unacceptable water quality, higher rates of infection with the
tubercle bacillus than almost anywhere else in the world, and shockingly high
rates of suicide and substance abuse among school children and young adults.
Housing conditions and facilities and funds for education are a national
disgrace. It passes my understanding
that any elected government can be aware of these facts yet advocate and enact
lower taxes while doing nothing to relieve the suffering, distress and blighted
lives of native people living on reservations. The hypocrisy of the Harper
government that apologizes to First Nations for the residential schools fiasco,
yet does nothing to alleviate the plight of these people, sickens me. It’s one of my reasons for remaining a
socialist, more accurately a social democrat in the European sense, although of course I was ideologically left of centre long before
Harper’s days and will be for as far as I can see into the future.
There’s been some recent discussion on CBC
radio about the benefits of taxes. I was encouraged to hear so many ‘ordinary’
Canadians spontaneously speaking up for the benefits we all derive from the
taxes we pay. Of course there were greedy, rapacious and mouthy dissenters,
even one know-nothing who said all taxation is robbery. I’m proud to say that I pay my taxes
willingly, while of course taking diligent action to minimize, but never to evade
or cheat on my tax; and when possible, I get the facts on how my tax dollars
are spent. The City of Ottawa aims for accountability and sets out clearly how
our city taxes are spent. Our provincial and federal governments are very coy
about how they spend our tax dollars. If
I had my druthers I’d be able to scrutinize financial statements from federal
and provincial governments too.
Critical thinking helps. Critical thinking came
after speed reading in development of my brain, but unlike speed reading it
hasn’t made me happier. More often it makes me mad as hell and unwilling to
take it any more, like that movie character. Critical thinking busts myths that
the manipulators of post-industrial society rely on to successfully con the
populace into going along with their schemes, manipulators like the oil
industry, investment bankers and marketers of cell phones and other electronic
gizmos with a half-life of a few months or less.
Here are three of these myths: Perpetual
economic growth is achievable. The air, water and land of our planet have
infinite capacity to absorb without stress all the foul poisons we dump. The
world is spacious enough to accommodate more than the 7 billion people now
living on it. The hard realities are that perpetual economic growth is NOT
achievable; the air, water and land of our planet are gravely harmed by the
foul poisons we have been dumping; and the world has a finite carrying capacity,
probably at least one order of magnitude lower than the number presently alive;
we began to exceed the earth's carrying capacity several decades ago, if not longer. Prospects for humankind would be more promising if the world's population was 7 hundred million rather than 7 billion, and was stationary rather than increasing by 30-50 million annually. Loosely
speaking, people to the right of centre believe these myths and live
accordingly; and people to the left of centre tend to disbelieve the myths or
at least are skeptical. It’s intriguing that these differences in beliefs appear to be associated with observable anatomical differences
in brain structure and presumably brain function. I
commented on this and gave references to sources in a post on March 7, 2012. I’m
sure there’s more about this intriguing fact on the web but I’ll leave readers to chase after it.
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