Bernstein Hit Home on State of Social Services

Harry Bernstein’s column, “U.S. Is Poor Model for Social Services” (June 11), was a brilliant detailing of our nation’s betrayal of our professed values in failing “to create a social system that shows compassion for all citizens.”

We are witness and adherent to a national leadership, which single-mindedly and with admirable skill concentrated the national will and resources to wage war abroad but which can call for little more than “points of light” to address ills at home--impoverishment, poor health care, family fragmentation, educational deficit and environmental degradation.

But this, apparently, is the leadership we want. So self-absorbed in our own problems of survival, we welcome the distractions of celebration, the scapegoating of “the other” and the fictions that problems can be solved without our making sacrifices.

Where is our outrage on behalf of the one-fifth of our neighbors who are poorly fed, poorly sheltered and poorly educated? Is it our “plan” to ignore them and, as a consequence, to quadruple the California prison population again in 11 years?

CARL TERWILLIGER, Glendale