Catholic Worker odds & ends - Rousseau and today's homeless
I read this in another LJ journal and felt a need to repost it.
"I've been reading Robert Gutman's biography of Mozart and just came across a quotation from Rousseau which describes what one sees everyday in Manhattan: more and more homeless people, old and young, begging on the streets. "…..Rousseau gave voice to his passionate concern about the social inequalities of his age in rigorous prose of a cold, white fury and irresistible logic. He reflected upon the disparity of wealth and, (in) the year of Mozart's birth, deplored the plight of 'unhappy peoples groaning under an iron yoke, mankind crushed by a handful of oppressors, a famished crowd vanquished by sorrow and hunger---a multitude whose blood and tears the rich drink peacefully, and everywhere the mighty armed against the weak by the formidable power of the law.'" In our time all of the same kind of inequality is buttressed by a reactionary majority in the House of Representatives aided by the same kind of majority on the Supreme Court and a President, who instead of directing his Justice Department to prosecute the criminals in Wall Street who have contempt for the poor, took money from them for his re-election. RS"
Catholic Worker odds & ends - Rousseau and today's homeless
"I've been reading Robert Gutman's biography of Mozart and just came across a quotation from Rousseau which describes what one sees everyday in Manhattan: more and more homeless people, old and young, begging on the streets. "…..Rousseau gave voice to his passionate concern about the social inequalities of his age in rigorous prose of a cold, white fury and irresistible logic. He reflected upon the disparity of wealth and, (in) the year of Mozart's birth, deplored the plight of 'unhappy peoples groaning under an iron yoke, mankind crushed by a handful of oppressors, a famished crowd vanquished by sorrow and hunger---a multitude whose blood and tears the rich drink peacefully, and everywhere the mighty armed against the weak by the formidable power of the law.'" In our time all of the same kind of inequality is buttressed by a reactionary majority in the House of Representatives aided by the same kind of majority on the Supreme Court and a President, who instead of directing his Justice Department to prosecute the criminals in Wall Street who have contempt for the poor, took money from them for his re-election. RS"
Catholic Worker odds & ends - Rousseau and today's homeless