Along these lines, I ran across a great article in Salon, here. The main gist dealt with retirement--about which I will post much more in a day or so--but this paragraph also jumped out at me and seems relevant to today's government news.
It's all part and parcel of the same dysfunction, as the die-hards try to selectively whack pieces of the government based upon their misguided ideologies.
As Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson write in their book, The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger, it’s not just lack of money and material resources that weaken a country, it’s the gap between rich and poor itself that makes things fall apart. This explains all kinds of incongruent phenomena, like why babies born in the U.S., a wealthy country that spends more on healthcare than any other, are more likely to die and have a shorter life expectancy than those born in Greece, a much poorer nation. And why murder rates, the number of teenage births, and obesity rates are higher in unequal societies, despite their relative wealth.
The link to Ultrarunning? It's a rather egalitarian sport, meaning "Affirming, promoting, or characterized by belief in equal political, economic, social, and civil rights for all people."
Out there in the backcountry, we are all just athletes doing our best to enjoy a peculiar pastime.
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