It seems so uncivilised as we mark our own card on our societies use of unarmed police and the slogan on every hospital, 'free at the point of need'. So much of our GDP is earmarked into seeing that the social needs of the society are met, including the dispossessed. In America the 'land of the brave' you have to be brave if your unemployed or feeling sick, there's no catch net based on the assumption that we can't all be winners and those that can't - should.
The vision of the down trodden families fleeing the hardship of Europe in the 1930s and 50s, emigrating to the States, the land of milk and honey was a tantalising experience. Europes customs and the ties to cultural life which formed the every minute aspect of life in Poland or Italy, was extinguished as the ship berthed in New York. The hustle of the life to make a dollar, dollar was king and its attraction had started almost as soon as immigrant stepped off the gangplank. The abundance of goods in the shops, at odds with the rationed society they had left behind, New York was an Aladdin's cave to the war weary European. No longer constrained by family, social and religious constrictions they had become anonymous as they set off into Brooklyn or Queens with an address for a nights accommodation and the long painful search for a job.
In Europe money counted but so did the society you grew up in. The rules and traditions the religious morays, the structure and the inter relationship of people from different backgrounds was often the glue to make life bearable. The family extended the emotional comfort a family usually does and the judgements, although tedious was usually fair. A woven web of culture and tradition was in itself a blanket to protect you from the vicissitudes of life, it allowed you to judge yourself at any stage against your peers and find comfort in finding they were still close.
In America you became a hustler, a pan handler, a doer of deeds, good and bad, some would have brought the full weight of social opinion down on your head when at home, in New York your anonymity protected you from all that. You could be a barrister or a bum and no one cared so long as the rent was paid. People were divided into those up in the clouds of their skyscraper apartments and those down at street level making do.
Life on the sidewalk was hard and dangerous and the jobs an immigrant could aspire to meant that they became even more anonymous in this land of untold wealth, how could a person be poor within such a prosperous society it was almost a crime not to succeed but a life of crime was sometimes the only way to make ends meet. The poor were blindsided, off the radar, they are the 'other people' discussed briefly at the dinner party, ostracised for not making it and for being a danger to those who had.
And so today this strange land of entrepreneurial success and social failure is a mystery. We believe we should know them, after all we speak the same language and share a love for literature and scholarship. We respect largely the same understanding of corporate law and a rough agreement on such matters as civil law and yet deep down we are so different because the people from Europe are a settled society, not a frontier society, we expect the institutions of government to solve our problems whilst in America, a government which interferes too much is rejected.
Our European sense of the importance of society in general, not the dinner party society but the ordinary chap on the street who you recognise as a mirror image of yourself and is vital as to how we behave towards each other is in some ways mirrored by the Black people in America who have their own affinity for each other as sisters and brothers, a society more European and potentially a more powerful cohesive force than the white American family, isolationist by temperament, individualistic by creed and weirdly obsessed by a divine providence fostered in their need for religiosity.
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