The above is a quote from a woman in Santa Barbara, CA. Sounds like a normal, hard-working life... except she and her two sons sleep in a car every night. She works two jobs and she and her family are homeless. She and people like her are profiled in an article originally posted in The Nation and also to Bill Moyers' website.
My news feed has had a small bump in stories about homelessness in America, for some reason I don't understand. It is not a new problem. It is always worth attention, though.
I think first about the debate over supporting Democrats. I have a lot of feelings about it and generally I condone the strategy of voting Democrat if it will help prevent a worse candidate from being elected- so voting for a Democratic presidential candidate if you live in a swing state. I have encountered a mentality among hardcore supporters of Democrats that change happens incrementally. The old "you can't make the perfect the enemy of the good," argument. You can't vote for Ralph Nader if the outcome will be a George W. Bush presidency.
To me, the argument is sound. However, this homelessness persisted through the Obama administration. The Nation article specifically talks about homeless people in deep-blue state California. Massive amounts of people are left behind in America, even under Democrats. They can't wait for incremental change. What are we to do? Everything we can to provide a salve- non-profit charity- while we quietly await incremental change to improve everyone's life? The lives of people working two jobs while still sleeping in cars with their kids... are we to celebrate incremental progress in this case? That this is their reality rather than a life of early death from cholera that might've befallen them in a previous time and place? Obviously not. This is wholly unacceptable at a time of such fabulous wealth. It is unconscionable. What are we to do? While we are voting for Democrats, we do not seem to have an answer about what to do for those desperate and marginalized. This is what drives a lot of opposition to Democrats from the left, the idea that there are marginalized people in desperate situations who cannot wait for incremental change. The Democrats do not have an answer for them.
Coincidentally, the BBC released an article about "The US poverty challenge facing [Drumpf]." "In this economy, there is no trickle-down. Gun crime is surging here." The report focuses on Baltimore, where 25% of residents live in poverty. One resident interviewed sums it up articulately and starkly: "The neighborhoods are falling apart not because the people are bad people. They're underpaid, undereducated, and so many of us have been living like this for 2nd or 3rd generations... we don't know how to change. Despair is a way of living."
"For so many... this is no longer a land of opportunity.... The children... have no American dream."
Dennis Kucinich writes in The Nation that this poverty exists by the design of our economic and political system:
In America today there are tens of millions of people with a hard-luck story. Tens of millions out of work, in ill health, in search of affordable rent, having neither a place nor a home to call their own; millions of people for whom, as Langston Hughes put it, life “ain’t been no crystal stair.”
No one who escapes such an environment physically or economically does it alone. There are teachers, coaches, doctors, lawyers, aunts, uncles, neighbors who appear as angels in our lives, who catch us when we are about to fall, who lift us up at the right moment, who show us a different path, who guide us in a new direction, who transport us to new possibilities, new futures.
But for every person upon whom fortune smiles, opportunity calls, and destiny stirs, there are many others for whom the future is obscured, for whom society is harsh, punitive, and unwelcoming.
...
Nineteen of every 20 dollars of new wealth created goes to the top 1 percent. The top 1 percent has more wealth than the bottom 90 percent.
This cataclysm for our democracy was accelerated with the subprime meltdown of a decade ago.
According to the National Center for Policy Analysis, as many as 10 million families lost their homes to foreclosure during the housing crisis, and as a result had to move, in some cases resulting in a resegregation of city neighborhoods.
During this period, the Federal Reserve created trillions of dollars and gave them to banks, while Congress authorized $700 billion to bail out banks, without passing a program to make sure that the masses of people underwater in their mortgages or those caught up in no-doc low-doc schemes would have a chance to hold onto their homes.
Meanwhile, one of the few investments held by the middle class, home equity, plummeted as housing values sank in many city neighborhoods.
Much of America has not recovered from the carnival of financial corruption of a decade ago—except for the finance economy, of course.
For those barely holding on to middle-class status, the median income for a four-person family is just over $54,000. Yet the average US household owes more than $16,000 to credit card companies, $172,806 on its mortgage, $28,535 on its car and $49,042 in student loans.
Health-care consumes about 17.8 percent of America’s GDP, or three trillion two hundred billion dollars. The Kaiser Foundation reports that the average month premiums for family coverage in 2016 is $1,511 a month, or $18,132 a year.
It is heartbreaking that this is our country.
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