Are the wealth and comfortable lives many of us lead a hindrance

to thinking about the problems faced by the poor, the weak, the ill,the elderly and other powerless segments of our society? This is especially critical in our culture where the poor are blamed for their laziness, the weak and the elderly are blamed for not having taken care of themselves in better days and so on.

Because the comfortable among us are at this time more numerous,both the Republicans and the Democrats do not want the taint of being associated with the 'losers'.So issues of survival for these people are seen as something that will not produce the votes. Even those issues can be neutralized by strategies such as voter disenfranchisement, rigged elections and setting off one group against another through racially charged invective etc.

I guess the biblical injunction of afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted is passe.