Woke up with a bit of panic and distress from having heard, while half asleep, about the class structure we are forming in America--what we sought to escape leaving England. No more Horatio Algers. And especially now that the estate tax, newly named the "death tax? and misunderstood by most Americans, will be abandoned.

I realized how all of members of congress, the judiciary, the administration, the media people who report about it, ALL send their children to private school. They don't even imagine how poor most of our public schools are. And I felt that as such a shame, because a fine education, I am sure, can save any child bright or eager or even average from the terrible powerlessness of poverty.

And there is totally, absolutely nothing I can do about it. Nothing. Even the liberals have no answer to the powerful bureaucracy of the school administrations, almost as bad as the labor unions become when labor is dishonest. Maybe, I'm wrong, maybe they are better than no unions for teachers. And I wonder if privatization would be better. And then, I think of privatization of prisons and the schools that have tried privatization.

We need more of those non-profit schools, the charter schools, that do work.

Seems like most of the powerful are rotten and greedy. And all of the poor are powerless, so that only those of the poor who are heros and the few who will claw their way up if necessary, that no one can stop, can get an education for themselves and their children.

Phooey!

Susan told me that a divorce hearing for someone she supported had been postponed again after months of postponement, that her lawyer had not done what needed to be filed about the husband and the children. So what could have been done two weeks ago is just done now. The woman seemed shattered. Susan was so angry that she was going to report this lawyer to the bar association and write an article about her uncaring inability for the newspaper, but then said lawyer began to cover her butt and began to move. And Susan sees how powerless are the poor. How they are left to wait.

And it makes me weakly furious, frustrated.

So the rich get richer. We played a game once in social-psychology to demonstrate that the rich can only gain and the poor can only lose what little they have to the rich.

Now we can have the upper class and we can have a professional working class of teachers, lawyers, doctors, architects etc. And then the working poor who can wait upon and serve the upper and professional class and the people on welfare, barely alive.

And where does the artist fit? He can move between the professional worker and the working poor and can entertain the upper and professional classes.

Maybe the real purpose of religion is to give us, we mortals, a little hope.