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Hey, I am angry and disappointed and all those things progressives have a right to feel after handing Obama the majority he has enjoyed in Congress. But more than that, I am angry and frustrated to watch as each person now wanting to claim the mantle of progressive refuses to come out and say what is so damn obvious--the country is running out of people who can make ends meet ever.It is something I feel particularly attuned to, living in a section of Queens, NY not far from one of the worst foreclosure areas in the entire city. Yet no one talks about this. We talk about all the bankers.
Who cares about the bankers? They can take care of themselves. How about helping the people who have no safety net and are in despair and their kids are getting stressed out because their parents are working, if at all, two or three jobs and the chances of getting out of high school keep getting slimmer because the mayor keeps closing the schools and the chances of work are worse at each turn of the economic news.
Forget the bankers.
When I travel between NYC and Iowa as I do several times a year, I see what the plague looks like. It is not swine flu, it is deserted communities, boarded up stores and houses, it is the unmown lawns on the highways because they do not have the money to do that. It is the loss of highway patrol cars sitting there waiting to catch a speed demon. It is the smell of despair when a kid has to take a job as a cashier at a gas station rather than affording college. Or a kid changes sheets on beds for minimum wage and tips because there are no real businesses in the town.
I have walked into K-Marts the size of airplane hangars that were deserted, with customers lined up making returns, not buying new goods.
I have seen how we destroyed the farms and built these new housing developments. Now we cannot fill them.
But closer to home, the number of empty and newly built apartment buildings on Queens Blvd. and Lefferts that have been sitting empty not for weeks or months but in some cases now for a couple of years.
And the empty hospital building on Queens Blvd. with a for sale sign on it. A hospital can be for sale?
We now have one emergency room in my neighborhood. And lots of people who are unemployed, who are depressed and no one to turn to because services everywhere are being cut.
Please, do not talk to me about bankers. What do they mean to me? But the man who showed up at the church to help us with the decorating before Christmas who had lost his job and become an alcoholic and needed to do something . . . or the mother of an asthmatic little boy in my building who has not worked since May last year . . . or the woman from our neighborhood who had pulled up stakes thinking that Las Vegas was going to be her salvation. Now she is back without a job or a place to stay.
Yikes, these are the people we all need to be working for.
Forget the bankers, as we know they have forgotten about us.
