Samoa must make a choice

Dear Editor,

Re: Message from 83-year-old beggar 

In the developed world that you aspire so deeply to emulate, people do not care for aged parents or young children. 

They put them in old age facilities and for those who can afford it their children are in expensive daycare facilities, if they can’t afford it the kids are left to fend for themselves while parents work their lives away. 

They cannot work the way you must work in the developed world to make ends meet and still be there for their aged parents and young children. You can’t have it both ways PS Jeffrey. 

You either forgo capitalism and continue to have a strong Aiga and a functioning Matai system who take care of each other or you adopt unfettered capitalism and pay for those who can’t work due to age or mental capability. 

The consequence of the society that you and the P.M are so madly chasing after has a social reality attached to it that you don’t seem to get. 

The state must now take responsibility for social issues such as poor children and discarded elderly who are not of age to be productive or past their productive prime. 

Those who are of productive age are too busy making money to be responsible for the care for the non-productive people of their capitalist society anymore. They are now so busy supporting the capitalist structure they are unable to fulfill the traditional roles of a traditional fa’asamoa society. It gets even worse for them when they lose their land because of capitalism. 

They end up working even harder but getting no further ahead economically. In a capitalistic society it is the lives of the 1 percent and their families that improve, everyone else just works harder for less and less and the state must pick up the slack and do what the overworked productive members of society used to have time to do but no longer have that time away from the competely competitive nature of capitalism that sucks the life from the average person and their families.

Wendy Wonder


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