Giving Thanks

Happy Turkey day to my American friends.

Today's Guardian reminds us that 43 years ago today, not just the USA but the world was mourning the untimely death of President Kennedy. What really surprised me was how good the writing about it in the Guardian was, succinct, informative, objective. When I followed the link to the archived article, I was expecting a more flowery style of writing so I was very pleasantly surprised.

"The torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans," said Kennedy. Hmmm. Well, I was a big fan of Bill Clinton and I certainly think of him as one of the new generation of Americans.
Since Kennedy's death we have seen big steps forward, although almost entirely to do with pressure from the groups themselves, for the Gay Community, for the non-white communities and to some extent for women. I know that's a big statement and maybe you could argue that the rights of all of those groups have slipped back as much as they have advanced, but I believe we have more than we did in 1963.

More but not enough. The World Economic Forum's 'Gender Gap Report' does not make pretty reading in 2006.
Taking four quite substantial criteria for assessing ranking, Britain comes ninth, Canada is 14th and the USA is number 22 after Moldavia, Croatia, Latvia, Lithuania and Columbia.

So that leads us to a little bit of politics does it not? Clearly the majority of people in the US are better off than the majority in say, Croatia. What the report is saying is that the wealth and power are spread more equally in Croatia than in the States.

I remember peddling my socialism to a friend who had slightly right-wing tendencies. His argument was that it was better to have some people having two things and some having one, than having everyone have one thing. This didn't make any sense to me since I felt that however you divvied up the wealth, it was the same to begin with, so giving some people more than others didn't work if you started from a position of having enough for one each. It must inevitably mean that the price of giving some two was that some had none. Simple.

The conservative argument of course is not that simple, because they feel that by encouraging everyone to want more, they will create more, which I still don't get because money stands for something real, something that occupies space and thus it cannot be created, simply redistributed.

So in this case, the case of gender inequality, which is better, for a nation to have more but to distribute it so that the majority is in the hands of one gender? Or to have less but to have it owned equally.

Well, here's the thing. Above the UK in the Gender Gap table, which you can load up if you go to the link, are all the Scandinavian countries, none of which are poor. And standing at number two is Norway. Norway is a country that aggravates the hell out of the EU because it has lots and lots of money since it is oil rich, and yet it will not join the EU. But within the country itself, it has gobsmackingly progressive social policies.
At number five is Germany, a country whose population is not hugely bigger than that of Britain and yet whose industrial output is second only to the United States.

At the bottom of the table are the oil rich Arab countries. That's all I'm going to say.

We have a lot to give thanks for in the West. But we still have one hell of a long way to go.

Like me in fact, I have 8,000 kilometres to travel today. And believe you me, if I could walk them instead of fly them, I would.