A Letter Concerning the Future to Selin, Karima, Lucie, Dimitri Andropolous, Kyle Pedersen, & Susanna
Claudewell S. Thomas, MD, MPH, DLFAPA, is an established psychiatrist who is currently retired ,, He received his medical degree in 1956 at SUNY Downstate College of Medicine and specializes in social psychiatry, public health psychiatry, and forensic psychiatry. Dr. Thomas was board certified by the American Board of Psychiatry... more
This is just a brief note to express appreciation for my invitation to the Urban Renewal Zoom event. I regret not being able to respond to a query because of the quirky Zoom connection. As I watched I was remembering the NFL football draft and the opportunity being afforded to the star collegiate and collegiate-aged males. My rough estimate was that 3/5 to 2/3 of the candidates were visible minorities and mostly black. With non-free association turned loose the slave markets of old and new worlds came roaring in and the dependence of rich white men on the health and durability of their potential property for profit. (Thus the teeth and eyes come in for scrutiny) Swiftly following comes the thought that some of these guys come from athletic genealogy which was checked and known, some were bred by parents for their new roles. What of injury...mostly an all bets off scenario if serious with only initial treatments covered...
Clearly, I've gone mad what has this to do with urban renewal? If one of the aims of renewal is to diminish racism then it must identify the government's responsibility on a national (federal) level to guarantee the welfare of its citizens. The issue of healthcare as a right vs health care as a privilege disappears. Mental healthcare is to be given on a need-appropriate basis rather than as a merchant-mediated commodity. (To each according to his (her) needs, acknowledging the reality of the industrial and technological revolutions, and to each according to his (her) deserts disappearing in the rubble of denied governmental response to citizenship.
Professor Arthur Brooks is quite correct in identifying the tanking of the economy every 4 to 7 years with the sweeping into mayhem of hundreds of thousands as the inevitable result of capitalism which is efficient at raising money but carries with it a slow evolving political structure and inevitably causes the emergence of forms of socialism as a countermeasure. I believe that Prof. Andropolous is quite correct in the assertion that the blue planet will be quite unfit for homo sapiens unless we can respond to the challenge of climate change and the onslaught of pandemics by counterposing a brotherhood of man, world governmental ethos permitting the introduction and enforcement of public health measures worldwide.
This urban renewal conference seems a continuation in time of the 1960s conference with job loss, pandemic presence (flu vs covid), opportunity for elimination of a concept of deserving vs undeserving poor, and the politicization of health and economic splitting and threatening redefining existing parties.
