Get Your Own!

“A few men or a few families own the country and run it for their personal benefit. There are no schools, hospitals, nurses, doctors, or medicines for the masses. The elite of those countries are intelligent and well educated. They have, however, no program for the people. Babies are born in miserable villages that do not have even outhouses. Filth piles high. Mothers do not know the secret of boiling water or pasteurizing milk or screening against flies. Children hardly every know laughter; they are old when they reach the teens and walk wearily through life. Their substance is perhaps a meal a day. A few villages have schools through the fourth grade; but they are for boys only. Even those who learn to read have no books. Their houses have no floors; their feet, no shoes; their rooms, no light. These villages are without aspirin, not to mention quinine; penicillin is nonexistent; so are surgeons to remove an appendix or drain a mastoid.

This picture of the village fits South America and Africa, as well as Asia. It is universal; it has not been changed by the billions we sent abroad. The perquisites of education, medical care, sanitary housing, and three meals a day were for the few at the top.”

Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas
Democracy’s Manifesto: A Counter Plan for the Free Society
Published 1962