Before my father became a firefighter, he was for many years a factory worker. He knew hard work, and he once told me that the harder he’d worked in his life, the more physical the labor, the less pay he’d received. He also reminded me near the end of his life that the rich had neither sympathy nor use for the poor.
Perhaps you’ve already seen the above video in which a working-class American, a painter who has his own small business, breaks down as he laments his inability to provide for his wife and daughter in these increasingly bleak economic times. His naked vulnerability, and his call for real change, will break your heart.
Have a heart if you’ve got a heart, my Polish mother-in-law would say, and she too knew the reality of factory work. Speaking of heart, she had a large and generous one. Why is it that those who have the least money while slogging the hardest for it often are the most generous?
Truly, you have to work so hard to be poor in America. Being poor comes at an enormous price in so many ways. Yet Americans are encouraged by our “betters” to focus on “lifestyles of the rich and famous” while disparaging and looking down on the working poor.
This country is seriously fucked, to use a technical term, and nothing is going to change until we listen to those who are calling for us to come together and make fundamental changes to a thoroughly corrupt and corrupting system of government/business that worships nothing but money as a measure of goodness and greatness.
There are over 2000 comments on this video and if you read some of them you will realize this is not an isolated incident. Everyone is feeling the pain. "This country is seriously fucked!" Is absolutely right, Bill. Linking as usual @https://nothingnewunderthesun2016.com/
After 48 years of wages, I found I was unable to afford comprehensive health insurance (Medicare/Medicaid simply doesn't cut it, especially with "pre-existing conditions"), a decent place to live, quality food (instead of Taco Bell and McDonald's dollar menus several times a week), even car insurance. As a result, these past 5 years I have lived in northern Europe, where between my Social Security and socialized medicine (I've retained my US citizenship but am a legal resident here), I'm doing all right. But I'll never get over having to leave the country (and let's not go into the political/social situation. That I subscribe to Bracing Views should say enough about where I stand on those topics and yes, they also had a part in my departure.)