When did the Good Samaritan slip from our public discussions?

[tannybogus]

Remember Lenny Skutnick? In January 1982, we watched on television as the D.C. office worker dove into the freezing Potomac to rescue victims of a plane crash. That day also gave us bank examiner Arland D. Williams Jr., the passenger who kept handing the lifeline to other survivors until he slipped beneath the waters and drowned.

More recently, multiple stories of grace and heroism cloaked the terrorist attacks of 2001, including the story of Chuck Sereika, a lapsed paramedic who grabbed a cellphone and hurried to the World Trade Center that morning to risk his life to crawl into the rubble and help pull two men out.

We call these people heroes. So why does that altruistic spirit — help people who need it — seem so absent from our public policy?

Deborah Stone, founding senior editor of the political magazine, The American Prospect, and research professor of government at Dartmouth College, wondered, too. The result is “The Samaritan’s Dilemma: Should Government Help Your Neighbor?” The seed for the book was planted when she realized in college that the public policy field had been commandeered by economists like Milton Friedman, the late Nobel laureate who along with others embraced self-interest over altruism.
We can almost recite the code by heart: The greedy shall inherit the earth, and helping others only encourages the helpless to be more so. We ignore the Biblical story of the good Samaritan, the parable character who looked beyond social and ethnic boundaries to help a man in need.

When did the Good Samaritan slip from our public discussions?

“I’ve been teaching political science and public policy for almost 30 years, and increasingly I’ve become so disturbed by the assumption that people are self-interested,” said Stone. “I think the ‘help your neighbor’ ethic is the closest thing we have to a universal moral value.”

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/08/10/10907/

O8)

[billyoc]

1. 30 years of deregulation and worship of the greediest among us,

who have convinced Americans that the unencumbered free market is the highest form of social organization have left this country a soulless, lifeless shell.

Happy Sunday! :hi:

[LeftishBrit]

2. I remember Maggie Thatcher's interpretation of the story..

that the *real* moral was that in order to have enough money to help the injured man, the Good Samaritan must have used and saved his money wisely!