1) Louisiana: The Third Poorest State
"Louisiana is the country's third-poorest state; 1 in 5 residents live in poverty. It ranks third in the proportion of residents who go hungry each year, and dead last in overall health." Louisiana leads the nation in its proportion of 'disconnected youth' -- 20 percent of 16-to-24-year-olds in 2015 were neither in school nor at work." (Nationally, the figure is 14 percent.) [1]

According to the American Cancer Society, Louisiana had the nation's second-highest incidence of cancer for men and the fifth-highest rate of male deaths from cancer.

2) Assessing the Underground Railroad
"For one thing, far from being centrally organized, the Underground Railroad was what we might today call an emergent system, it arose through the largely unrelated actions of individuals and small groups, many of them were oblivious of one another's existence." "Yet mainstream attention goes to the African Methodist Episcopal Church, which was established in 1816, in direct response to American racism and the institution of slavery, and played at least as crucial a role in raising money, aiding fugitives, and helping former slaves who had found their way to freedom make a new life." [2]

"Most whites faced only fines and the opprobrium of some in their community, while those who lived in anti-slavery strongholds, as many did, went about their business with near-impunity."

The Underground Railroad didn't operate below the Mason-Dixon Line at all. Aside from a few outposts in border states, the Railroad was a Northern institution. As a result, for the roughly sixty percent of America's slaves who lived in the Deep South in 1860, it was largely unknown and entirely useless. "Instead, while slavery itself was against the law in the North, upholding the institution of slavery was the law." "Outside of scattered pockets in upstate New York, Massachusetts, and the Midwest, moral opposition to slavery was not the norm above the Mason-Dixon Line."  [3]

The Underground Railroad was perhaps the least popular way for slaves to seek their freedom. The historian, Eric Foner, estimates that, between 1830 and 1860, some thirty thousand fugitives passed through its network to freedom. In 1860, the number of people in bondage in the United States was nearly four million. Foner, making the best of difficult data, suggests that across the country and throughout the duration of slavery, the number of white Americans who regularly aided fugitives was in the hundreds. "In the entire history of slavery, the Underground Railroad offers one of the few narratives in which white Americans can plausibly appear as heroes." [4]

3) Affordable Care Act Problems
Aetna's decision to leave Obamacare "reflects an awkward reality: the jury-rigged, potentially compromised nature of Obamacare has made the program unstable, and unable to live up to its lofty promises." "Some thirty million Americans remain uninsured. participants in the A.C.A. marketplaces are less numerous, and sicker, than anticipated: 8.3 million fewer people enrolled through the exchanges this year than the Congressional Budget Office had projected. As a result, insurers in much of the country are fleeing the marketplaces. [5]

The Kaiser health organization estimates that between twenty and twenty-five percent of U.S. counties may have only one insurer offering coverage in 2017. "The U.S. could well end up with a two-tier insurance market in which people lucky enough to get insurance through their employers will get much better coverage and wider options than those on the individual market, even when both groups are paying the same amount in premiums." [6]

In the final analysis, if we want to make universal health insurance a reality, the government needs to do more, not less.

4) Child Soldiers
"The phrase 'child soldier' tends to conjure images of places like Sierra Leone, where minors were used extensively, and in other African conflicts during the nineteen-nineties. But boys and girls under the age of eighteen have been deployed in battles throughout the world." "A recent report by the Quilliam Foundation describes Islamic State propaganda videos that feature children committing murder and suggests that the group is broadcasting its willingness to flaunt international norms in a deliberate effort to seize the psychological upper hand. This is a standard feature of any curriculum in homicide: progressive exposure to violence." [7]

Child soldiers often rely on drugs to inure themselves to horror. Committing murder may mean upward mobility.

Footnotes
[1] Arlie Russell Hochschild, "No Country for White Men," Mother Jones, September/October 2016.

[2] Kathryn Schulz, "Derailed," The New Yorker, August 22, 2016.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] James Surwiecki, "Sick Business," The New Yorker, September 5, 2016.

[6]Ibid.

[7] Patrick Radden Keefe, "Young Guns," The New Yorker, September 12, 2016.