Bob Bell's Letter From America - Considering the Past Few Days

I had planned to write another piece about pubs and bars I have known over the years, but find it hard, no, not just hard, but impossible, completely impossible to ignore what is going on in America now.

I am angry to the point of incoherence, saddened to the brink of despair. 

I have no real wish to write a political polemic, I am not a pundit. I know what I believe in, but don’t have the experience or the requisite talent to express those kinds of thoughts.

I do know, however, that ever since I was old enough to watch and understand British TV newsreels in the late ‘50s and early ’60s that all was not right in America. I watched the Civil rights movement from afar, saw police dogs attack black people, gazed in horror as fire hoses were blasted at marchers. A country whose economy was founded on slavery was finding it hard to come to terms with its racist calumny.

It is now 2020. Sixty years later. And things ain’t much better. Indeed, on some fronts they are getting worse.

I regularly drive by huge homeless encampments, under bridges, besides the roads, rows of tents pitched on the sidewalks themselves. At nearly every stoplight there is a man or woman with an outstretched hand. 

“Can you please help? Can you, please?” These people were not born to be beggars, this is not the career or lifestyle they planned. Stuff happened to them, unforeseen by them and their families and friends. A job lost, a rent increase too far, an illness that could not be paid for, and so their lives morph into despair and degradation, poverty and often addiction.

It is a huge problem all over the country; it is just as huge right here in the San Francisco Bay Area. All of us wring our hands, wishing we could simply wish it away, but of course that is not to be. Task forces are assembled, meetings held, propositions made, funds set aside, but it is never enough, never enough. There is a shortage of national compassion, a shortage of determination, a lamentable shortage of love.

Blame is laid at the door of the health system. The quality of health care in the US is very, very high. If you are unfortunate enough to get sick, you will be well taken care of. With just one caveat. Do you have health insurance? Most of the health insurance here comes with employment - the employer pays for your health plan. Lose your job, lose your health plan. Hate your job? Awful company? Getting harassed on the job? If you leave, you lose your coverage.

To be sure, if you turn up at the emergency room, you will not be turned away. But you will be billed. So two things happen. People without insurance use the emergency room when they just have to see a doctor. And when they do, they have postponed it so many times because of the dread of the cost, that by the time they actually do show up, their health is in really bad shape.

So there is that.

Now there is Covid-19 shadowing our every move. Millions of jobs are lost, millions are separated from their health plans. The money that the government had made available for those out of work, for those companies who are trying to hang on, is running out. Looks like a lot more blue tarps and tents will be coming to town.

No need to write any more about this virus - I think everyone on the planet has had it up to their ears.

And as if all this misery is not enough, a handful of unthinking and uncaring cops needlessly took the life of George Floyd, a black man.  Captured on video, the murder was the match to the gasoline-soaked African-America population. 

We all know of the resulting protests, the marches, the demonstrations across America, and now the world. The shroud has been ripped from the US. Now the entire planet can gaze upon the festering body of the Land of the Free. Some of the demonstrations have been co-oped by right and left-wing anarchists and provocateurs, the result being the destruction of property and businesses of innocent folk, and, perhaps, not so innocent. Who knows what lies in the hearts of the population at large?

One hopes for goodness and compassion, that’s for sure. I suppose the keyword is hope, for without hope we are indeed scuppered, damned and doomed.

One also hopes, against hope, that all of this presages a real change, a genuine game-changing determination that we collectively can do better than this. Floyd’s death was certainly an insult to the black population: it was also an affront to civilisation. It is a fact, and a small comfort, that many of the protesters out there on America’s streets are of many ethnicities. 

But there is also this, and this is the elephant in the room. Figuratively and politically. The current inhabitant of the White House, whose name I will not deign to write, has, since he took office in 2017, done his very best to abolish Obamacare, America’s tentative first step towards a sensible and comprehensive health care system. He and his Republican cronies, who, let there be no mistake, are very very complicit, have stoked the fires of racial intolerance and prejudice, and at the same time gutted as much of the social safety net as they could. They have demonised immigrants, and fuelled the fires of resentment and anger. 

They have botched the attempts to control and mitigate the virus in the most shameful way, abdicating any sense of national responsibility, any sense of leadership, and dare I say it again, compassion?

This week, on the orders of the man in the White House, demonstrators were teargassed and fired upon with rubber bullets to clear the way for a photo op so that man, that illiterate atheist from the White House, might be able to brandish a bible in front of a church.  

Quite possibly 40% of America’s population think that was a good thing. Think about that.

And so here we are. Enraged at many things, angered by that which we have little control over, and saddened, oh how saddened, at what America is become.