I wrote this piece last year, called...
People in the Streets
I wrote an email to Tom Hayden after I read his excellent piece in the Nation, "Exit Strategies for Afghanistan and Iraq." My thinking was that he was right, of course, but that people would have to take to the streets for this war to end.
He replied that that was true enough, but that "getting people into the streets is a somewhat magical thing, unpredictable." And then I started thinking about the faces on the people that I see in the streets already ...
I wrote an email to Tom Hayden after I read his excellent piece in the Nation, "Exit Strategies for Afghanistan and Iraq." My thinking was that he was right, of course, but that people would have to take to the streets for this war to end.
He replied that that was true enough, but that "getting people into the streets is a somewhat magical thing, unpredictable." And then I started thinking about the faces on the people that I see in the streets already ...
I live outside of Annapolis. You would never know from driving through the Parole section of town that the economy was not booming--if it weren't for the stragglers.
Look close and you start to see bald tires here and there, and jumper cables. I pulled into a spot at the Food Lion yesterday. The young woman in a beat-up car parked next to mine, with her baby and her mother inside, was out of gas. She wanted to know if she could come into the store with me and pay for my groceries with her county food aid card so she could get the cash from me to buy gas. (I bought her a couple of gallons.)
Last week I picked up a hitch-hiking young woman on my way into town. It was 11 a.m. and she'd been out in the country, cleaning houses. This after coming off her midnight shift cleaning offices at the Naval Academy. Her van had broken down and she had no way to pick up her two children from a paid sitter's apartment in the projects. Her son was disabled and could only be transported by a wheel chair friendly van. She couldn't to find a way to pay for the special van that she would have to hire from the taxi company...
And yesterday, at the busiest intersection in the area, at the center of commerce at the height of traffic, I looked into the face of a not unattractive young blonde woman with green eyes that were red with tears and despair. She was bending to pick up her handwritten cardboard sign. The light had just changed and I was through the intersection before I could read what it said. But I could guess.
It is very rough out there.
There was a front page headline recently: "Millions of Unemployed Face Years Without Jobs." Combine that with Bob Herbert's columns about our crumbling infrastructure and you have a very good reason why we need to find better ways for America to spend its dwindling resources. Here's great piece from Ted McClaughlin at The Rag Blog: Repeating Bad Behavior, Houston's KBR gets $2.8 billion contract.
One of Herbert's columns was titled "What's Wrong with Us?"
People are in the streets now out of despair, but if something isn't done to get our priorities in order--and quickly--the magical and unpredictable phenomenon of angry protests in the streets is sure to come, because as it stands, there are no jobs coming in this recovery and we'll never pay off our national debt.
We could be in for a very wrenching couple of years.
ORIGINALLY POSTED TO DANWALTER ON FRI MAR 12, 2010 AT 01:38 PM PST.