Bombay, USA

Picture this… You’re a diplomat stationed in Bombay, India, late 1960’s. You live in the diplomatic compound, a high-walled community that virtually shuts out the world outside. Within the compound live diplomats and their families from all over the world. The grounds are beautiful. Lush vegetation and colonial-style buildings. Servants attend to their every need. They have all of the amenities and social interaction of any close community. A club with pool and tennis and restaurant and bar and snooker… you get the idea.

By day the diplomats go to their various embassies or consulates and represent their respective country’s interests, which often gets pretty heated. But by night they lounge and enjoy cocktails together at each other’s homes or at the Club.

No one leaves the compound on foot or unattended. If you do stubbornly decide to go for a walk outside of the compound, a couple of Gurkas go with you. Although this is highly unlikely because there is every reason not to walk outside. For outside the walls of the diplomatic compound lie the streets of Bombay, a teeming mass of humanity living on the verge of extinction.

This scenario is true, related to me by my uncle who was a U.S. diplomat working for the U.S. Information Service at the time. Propaganda was his game. He was good at it, because he liked and embraced the different cultures in which he was stationed. People naturally gravitated to this tall, handsome American with gentlemanly manners.

Unk told me he once insisted on taking a walk outside but it took some time for the two Gurkas to open the man gate. Something on the outside was blocking it. It turned out to be a dead body. He said the thing that got to him most was the stench. Even more than what he saw. Filth everywhere. He said that the contrast between the haves and have not’s in India was so stark as to be shocking.

He told me it wasn’t at all unusual to see great old Rolls Royce’s, Bentleys, Auburns or Dusenbergs on the street in perfect operating condition because the wealthy owners simply had new parts milled every time anything broke. He said they were often better than new.

Uncle had the best of everything while there, tailored clothes, the finest medical care, household servants… because he could afford the best of everything. A bureaucrat’s salary made you a well-to-do man there, in that place and time.

Here’s the take-away. Do gated communities and people begging on the street sound familiar to you? Do run-down county medical clinics crowded with the unwashed, or simply unlucky, sound familiar to you? Do people who are simply cast aside because of accident of birth sound familiar to you?

No child in this country should go hungry. But they do. No one who is disabled and unable to take care of themselves should have to fend for themselves on the street. But they do. No one should be left destitute in old age because they’ve been stripped of everything they have by the medical industrial complex. But they are.

The scene depicting India above is happening to some degree or another right here, right now, in the good ole USofA every day. If you think that good medical care, a good education, a meal and a roof over your head is the least we can do for each other, it’s time to speak up.

If you voted for and really want Change, you had better start raising hell people! The money grubbers are pulling out every trick in the book to kill it.