I had various ideas for a post about Jewish War Veterans during the Jewish American Heritage month, but none of them worked out so I just went to the Jewish Community Center and took some (low quality) photos of the displays presented by the Jewish War Veterans MO/KAN Post 605.
For a professional online exhibit on the subject please visit: Jewish Veterans of World War II.
With paramedics, polyclinics and plastic bone banks everybody gets free care in the USSR.
In the 1919 when the newly launched Soviet Union was threatened by a plague of louse-borne typhus, Vladimir Illyich Lenin bluntly warned his countrymen: “Either the lice defeat socialism or socialism defeats the lice.” The USSR survived the lice and in the half century since has built to most massive system of the national health care ever known, still based on Lenin’s logical, if unsentimental premise: Russia needs her workers, and a sick worker cannot work.
From birth do death the Soviet citizen is followed by a dossier of his health history. He may get production line preventive treatment without leaving his post at school, factory, farm or office. If he is sick but can walk, he goes to a polyclinic, one of thousands of free, all-purpose infirmaries. At least in the cities there are doctors aplenty. Of the world’s 2.5 million physicians, 500,000 – or one in five – are Russians. (The U.S. by comparison has 309,000 M.D.s, for a population 85% as large. Another half million trained medical assistants called feldshers supplement the doctors, particularly in the vast, thinly settled rural outlands.
The system has flaws. To achieve quantity, the quality of treatment often suffers. Hospital sanitation is spotty at best. Anesthetics and modern equipment are often unavailable and most advanced drugs have to be imported. Dentistry is painfully old-fashioned. Medical education considered as a whole, is not up to U.S. standards (I would argue with that. M.V). But the Soviet goal is a lifetime health care for everyone, and any enterprise that ambitious is bound to have failings.
At the top, a Soviet manager points to a map of windbreaks and hands his worker a sack of acorns to plant under the heading “We are planting life!“. At the bottom, a capitalist directs a general to a map of the military bases under the heading “They are planting death!“.
Recently I noticed several billboards on the opposite sides of the State Line with the similar “compare and contrast” message.
On the Kansas side we should be thanking the legislators for our “safer roads & 1000s of new jobs for Kansans”:
Kansas legislators make construction workers happy; the guy in the middle and his shovel are ready to build even more roads for the grateful Kansans.
But on the Missouri side the same guy is not smiling, he can’t even lift the shovel because of those fund-delaying evil legislators the gullible Missourians voted into the office. He even tucked his shirt in, that’s how sad he is.
That’s why there is nothing but the pothole-ridden rough road ahead for the Missourians and the unsuspecting visitors to the state.
Obviously, it’s not fun to be a construction worker in Missouri, no reason to smile for sure. Maybe just for the photos for billboards on the Kansas side.
*photographing billboards is not easy and it was raining today, hence the quality.
Ivan Rebroff who was neither “Ivan” nor “Rebroff”, became world-famous for singing Russian Folk Songs. My Father always cherished an old “contraband” record of Rebroff’s incredible voice.
