Unnatural Causes and Nice White People

Last night a friend and I went to the first of a series of lectures/community meetings at the library. The series orbits around the documentary, Unnatural Causes... is inequality making us sick?

The documentary portion was really quite good, creating the space for many good questions and not (as of the first portion) offering any tidy answers. One thing I found exciting was that the meeting itself wasn't just a bunch of upper middle class white folks sitting around tut-tutting about how to help those people. There were actually some first generation immigrants who seemed to have a lot to contribute. I hope they will be at future meetings.

One thing I that made me cringe (repeatedly) was the explicit and implicit lamentations about the breakdown of society and the wish to get back to The Good Old Days -