Where's Mr. Micawber when you need him?

A recent Jonathan Schell essay in The Nation, “Cruel America,” centered on the glee expressed at a Republican debate when Rick Perry bragged about his state’s record of executions.

 The article goes on to contrast the United States with other “civilized” nations regarding its record on such executions (most nations that purport to be democracies have abolished the death penalty) and imprisonment (with 2 million Americans in prison, we have the highest per capita prison population in the world – and we are dedicated to liberty and justice for all).

I thought again, as I often have recently, of Charles Dickens. I’d been thinking of how the agenda of the far right seems to include dismantling unions as well as health care – such as it is – and such safety nets as Social Security. Rick Perry’s audience that night also cheered lustily at the idea of letting a putative uninsured young man die if he were in a coma.

And perhaps that’s OK. Terry Schiavo comes to mind. But back to the unions. I know a lot of us think unions are way  over the top, and that unions in general are a bad idea, and so forth. Friends, if that’s your view, I think you might want to look again. In this country, it was unions that put an end to child labor and the seven-day work week, among other things. It was a union that gave journalists like me a living wage and health insurance and enabled me to send a child to college. Believe me, non-union newspapers did not provide any of the above.

Are those bad things, to abolish child labor and enable a working family to have health insurance and send its children to college? You tell me. As I was thinking about the unions, I thought of Dickens, and of how much of the point of his wonderful novels was to expose the social evils of his day, including child labor, abuse of women, and a total lack of any safety net for the working poor.

I wonder what he’d think today of our vastly wealthy society where the working poor can’t even find work. In his day, they’d have been sent to the “poor house” or the “work house,” where they’d have been consigned to the economic equivalent of unremitting slavery until death – or until some nice middle class Micawber showed up to bail them out.

Unfortunately, the current economic tsunami has wiped out most of the Micawbers along with the undeserving poor. Sometimes I think the destruction of the middle class was not an accident. But I digress.

In Dickens’ time, people also still gathered to cheer at public executions. I believe that, 100 years later, we thought we’d grown out of that stage. But it appears not.

In his Nation essay, Jonathan Schell dwells for a bit on the infinitely slippery slope from decency to depravity. He doesn’t call it that, depravity: He calls it cruelty. He says, and I quote: “An unjust society must reform its laws and institutions. A cruel society must reform itself.”

Schell continues, “There have been many signs recently that the United States has been traveling down a steepening path of cruelty. It’s hard to say why such a thing is occurring, but it seems to have to do with a steadily growing faith in force as a solution to almost any problem, whether at home or abroad.”

To read more of what Schell has to say about cruelty in our prisons, our economy,  our lives and our social fabric, go to www.thenation.com/article/163690/cruel-america.

 What would Charles Dickens say?