We are living, Mick, in a banana split Republic: Obesity driven health; greed driven wealth, the one from nutritional ignorance, the other from a competitive need to be the richest person on the planet.
Both are tearing the fabric of our country. Working class is kept in its place, part of which is in fast food restaurants; the worst part of which is low wages, refusing, thereby, to share fairly the proceeds of innovation.
The wealthy appear by their actions to not realize the garbage man works just as hard as they do, the farmer works just as hard as they do, teachers, nurses, retail clerks, bus drivers, housemaids, all work just as hard as they do.
A garbage man, say, doesn't inherit a stream of knowledge from prior garbage men that makes his job easier. They don't share the wealth of the innovator who rigged a truck to pick up cans and dump them. (Not the best example.)
Innovators do inherit a stream of knowledge from prior generations, filling in a final blank to innovate, such as Jeff Bezos did modifying Sears Roebuck, putting them out of business like covered wagons before them. Bezos is the richest man on the planet.
But this inheritance of accumulated knowledge may be the source of moral riches.
The inspired words our founders wrote in the Declaration of Independence--I call them inspired because they did not logically infer from their slave-owning personal lives-- trickled down in the words of Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg, inspired civil rights activity and sacrifices, produced civil rights legislation, feeds today's civil rights innovators--this young generation protesting George Floyd's death as I type--and , like innovators before them, will take the past and change the future.
We're on the cusp, Mick, of realizing the full meaning of our founders' words, that all men are created equal. The pandemic, ironically will remove our racist president. (God, now Trump wants to postpone the election.)
The nation's health will improve, its wealth will be more fairly shared, its promise realized.
