West, Post-Class 4-25

"One essential step is some form of large-scale public intervention to ensure access to basic social goods - housing, food, health care, education, child care, and jobs. We must invigorate the common good with a mixture of government, business, and labor that does not follow any existing blueprint" (West, 630).

After describing the 1992 Los Angeles rights and explaining its analogous moral, West writes this quote above. He seems to lay out a design for a better society, sounding like a Utopian society. I, a more cynical man than Cornell West, will argue that most of these things our country needs to change, will not change. One topic he hits on is health care; Congress recently passed a universal health care bill, which will insure some 30 million Americans with health care. Already, the bill has come with little favor from those in the upper class. Remember Marx's golden rule, "Those with the gold, rule." My theory is that, within the next coming years, universal health care will become history in America, due to those with the gold in our country. Unfortunately, I will argue the same for "housing, food...education, child care, and jobs." Our society is too entrenched in the ideology of capitalism and I could not foresee ourselves digging out of that ideological box too soon.