During a road trip the other day, a friend helped me give voice to the vision I think could create a real choice in politics. Here’s the kernel: We on the left need to craft our own emotionally compelling narrative that acknowledges the real pain of falling behind and not providing what we had hoped to for our children.
We are the 98%, the true working class that keeps America going. We suffer from wages that don’t keep pace with the cost of living, education that leaves our children unemployed, medical care that is inaccessible, religion that doesn’t salve our wounds and tells us to harm others …
Poverty is not urban and Black or rural and White. It is everywhere. In the big homes where folks rely on food banks and juggle bills and the encampments of our exploding unhoused neighbors: doctors, teachers, and the chronically ill or unemployed. The struggle to make do and get by is the shared experience of this country. Suffering is not determined by race, education level, or where we live. It is the reality of those of us who work hard and produce wealth that benefits the bosses, the owners, the wealthy.
We need to tell the story that the poor in the U.S. are all of our essential workers who kept on throughout quarantine. Yes. But our poor are also our underpaid skilled or professional workers in offices, factories, universities, schools. Our self-employed and our salaried teachers and aides and nurses and builders who put in long hours but get no overtime.
We who do not agree with GOP/MAGA doctrine can’t keep running from immigration and guns.
I’m hard-pressed to say something sensible about the guns that have turned this nation into a slaughterhouse of children and a war zone. But we need to remind ourselves that the myth of a Wild West may have built this county, but the story of this nation is one of immigrants and immigration. 98% of us are only a generation or three from another home in another nation. We non-indigenous folks are all immigrants, and together we feed, educate and care for this nation. We are today . . . and tomorrow.
Photo courtesy of Gratisography.
Ruminations 