Today on NewsGangLive, Karoli started the program by asking what “The Fierce Urgency of Now” meant to each of us today. Here’s what it means to me:
They say that every once in a while, a recession is necessary to wring out the excesses in the system.
They say that Bernanke should resign and that the sub-prime market deserves what it is getting. Lenders, buyers, brokers and realtors all got greedy.
Everyone should have known better.
That is the conventional wisdom from the economists I see on TV. But let me tell you what I see in MY house.
We’re not wringing out excesses. We’re eliminating necessities. Or at least some of us are.
Once again, my son (more accurately, my former foster son who is now a man) has been laid off. He has been working at a steel truss plant, and they just don’t have any work at the plant because of the real estate slowdown. Not surprising. But very sad.
Having done his time and paid his restitution, he is engaged to be married to a very nice girl and they can’t afford to get married. He goes to college, she goes to college. He has a job (or did), she has a job. They are doing nothing wrong. In fact, they’re doing everything right. No drinking, no carousing, no popping off to strange vacation spots. They have a plan and a budget.
But right now they don’t have much more opportunity than Barack Obama’s mythical Kenyan half-brother.
Because Jerry has felonies on his record, he’s precluded from working in just about every industry you can imagine, including health care (which has great shortages) and financial services. He couldn’t even get a job with Target lifting boxes, because they do a background check. So do most large companies. No one is forgiven, even if (as he has) they have done their time, grown up, and even paid off their restitution.
To me, this is incredibly unfair. Yes, he was on drugs as a teenager. If you had grown up in his birth family, you probably would have been as well. His mother is still on crack, his father committed suicide because he owed drug dealers money, and his older sister ran away and has never been seen again. No one in the family had graduated high school before he did–while in prison. And last semester he got all A’s.
When he moved into my house at age ten, my husband and I sold him the middle class bill of goods. School is worthwhile, work is worthwhile, obeying the law is worthwhile, because there are societal rewards for these actions.
Outside of a year of backsliding after my husband died, Jerry bought the dream. In prison, he bought the dream of the new start. He took all the classes: anger management, substance abuse, plumbing, wiring, carpentry, writing — everything they offered, he took.
Yet right now, if it weren’t for me and my house in Phoenix, he would be homeless, just as his family used to be after they spent all their welfare on drugs.
This is tough on his fiancee, who is herself a dreamer. But she’s working at Costco, trying to support her own education, begging her employer to transfer to a store closer to home, so she won’t be spending all her money on gas.
In the mean time, I hear both presidential candidates spouting platitudes about what Russia must do, what Georgia must do, what Congress must do. I hear a lot about change, and a lot about offshore drilling. A lot about posturing and positioning to the rest of the world, and a lot about each other’s flipflops.
But I don’t hear either of them offering Jerry an opportunity. Weren’t we the Land of Opportunity?
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