If you want to see what is happening to a culture, to see in what direction it is heading, look to see what is happening to the indigent, the poor… the widow, the orphan, the stranger.

—Jamie Gates

Gates is an associate professor in the Anthropology Department at Point Loma University.  I didn’t write down what he said until his lecture ended, so the statement above is not an exact quote.  Professor Gates' lecture focused on “Justice and Reconciliation in Post Apartheid South Africa.”  His point is that how ideological conflicts between groups are resolved determines what a nation becomes. 

…so I’m left wondering.  Where is my nation headed?

Extreme poverty in the U.S., meaning households living on less than $2 per day before government benefits was 1.5 million households in 2011, including 2.8 million children.

America is the world’s wealthiest nation, yet almost 15 percent of U.S. households — nearly 49 million Americans, including 15.9 million children — struggle to put food on the table.

Nearly one-third of Americans don’t have the security of knowing that, if and when they need it, medical care is not available for them… so they go along without preventive care until a critical health situation appears, and they then go to a hospital emergency room.

According Dr. G. William Domhoff’s research at the University of California, in Santa Cruz, in the United States, wealth is highly concentrated in a relatively few hands.  As of 2010, the top 1% of households owned 35.4% of all privately held wealth, and the next 19% (the managerial, professional, and small business stratum) had 53.5%, which means that just 20% of the people owned a remarkable 89%, leaving only 11% of the wealth for the bottom 80% (wage and salary workers.  In terms of financial wealth (total net worth minus the value of one’s home), the top 1% of households had an even greater share: 42.1% of the country’s financial wealth.

Obviously communism didn’t work for the Soviet Union. A deformed sort of capitalism in Russia is steadily evolving into a culture that has more wrong with it than is right. The system of government in the People’s Republic of China is still called communism, but the market economy has produced almost 300 billionaires (American dollars) and citizens in the middle class. Belarus is the only communist country left in Europe. Nobody on the outside want in and the people I met in Minsk once expressed longing to be somewhere else. North Korea is the best example in the world of why communism isn’t good for people.  Vietnam, Cuba, and Laos are the other countries that call themselves communist.