They’re going to get rid of mortality
For the rich
Before they get rid of poverty
For the poor
It’s not complicated: the rich can pay
The poor cannot
But you want to know about the middle class!
The poor will die of natural causes
Though I’m not going to call poverty natural
It’s man-made, as we used to say
But you want to know about the middle class!
We’ll just have to be killed
When we run out of money
No, that’s not right
The government will continue to pay
The hospitals, drug companies, doctors, etc.
Lots of money will be made keeping us alive
Until the government decides
It has no more money
If you prefer, we won’t have to be killed
Just die
(Another pill, our final entitlement)
While the rich
Will be calculating their stock market revenue stream from there to eternity
— Poem and drawing by William Eaton
The Adam Gopnik article: Can We Live Longer but Stay Younger? (Subtitle: With greater longevity, the quest to avoid the infirmities of aging is more urgent than ever.) The New Yorker, 13 May 2019.
See also: “[P]overty is a far more important cause of shortened life expectations in the United States than smoking, but it is smoking that gets all the attention).” David Harvey, Marxism, Metaphors, and Ecological Politics, Monthly Review, March 1, 1998. And this might lead some to my own Class Warfare Poverty Death, Zeteo, December 1, 2015. Two bits from that piece:
- Hunger is the number one cause of death in the world, killing more than HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis combined.
- In the United States, the number of deaths attributable to low education is comparable to the number caused by acute myocardial infarction (heart attack).
That piece is accompanied by a few images from the photographs taken by Nick Hedges for Shelter, a housing and homelessness charity in Scotland. For more, see Nick Hedges’ photographs for Shelter 1969-72.
montaigbakhtinian 