Dale Maharidge spent spent several
years traveling by rail to many parts of America speaking with people
who have been affected by what he calls the New Depression in
his book Someplace in America: The new depression. It was
very disheartening to discover just how bad many Americans are
suffering today. Many people have gone broke because of health care
bills. Some have been laid off because of jobs leaving the country.
Other factors—things that could happen to any of us like fires,
floods, natural disasters, car accidents, have ravaged their lives.
The employment rate has risen back to
9.1 percent overall, almost 18 percent in African American
communities, and it will be 50 t0 60 percent for Latino American and
African American teenagers in the inner city. What will the youth be
doing this summer? One may say this is a travesty, or that we all
need to buckle down and share in the hard times that sometimes
happen. The truth is that these are just not hard times that
happened. Much of this has been either engineered, or maintained,
purposely by those who make profit from the suffering of working
class people and the poor. Even the prisons have been privatized.
It is more profitable for corporations who own prisons to have people
locked up, which costs each tax payer about 40,000 dollars per
person, than working for half that cost.
After the big mortgage crash more than
700 billion dollars were given to banks and large financial
institutions, no strings attached, so that the capital would continue
to flow. This money still has not reached those in need. People’s
mortgages are still being foreclosed, money is still being invested
overseas instead of in the U.S., and jobs are still not being
created. The companies that profited from these interest free loans
have not only made record profits, but they are not paying taxes.
Some have even received tax credits as the money flows outward to
foreign investments. In the meantime families are becoming homeless
or barely able to make it. We blame this crash on unions and on
teachers? There is a much larger problem here.
The problem is that no one really cares
about the average American. The social contract has been broken.
The government no longer answers to the demands of the people, and
small groups of the people no longer support the well being of the
whole country as much as they support themselves or their small
group. Until we can come together and realize that we are one
nation under God and one people, and that a divided people will
not prosper, we will have runaway unemployment, runaway jobs, and all
of the Commonwealth will continue to be sold to private companies.
We have returned to the Great
Battle-field that Lincoln referred to in his Gettysburg
Address, but this battle field is within our hearts and minds.
What we do will decide whether this nation dedicated to the
proposition that all men are created equal will endure. It is
truly up to us to not be willing to see our neighbors driven into
poverty. And who is my neighbor? Anyone who I will treat kindly out
of the love in your heart.
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