A voice for those of us on the bottom of the scrap heap, giving readers a glimpse firsthand of what the future looks like for more and more people.
Bob Herbert was quite an asset to NYT; he always was ahead of the curve with topic choice, and unafraid to use elegantly concise language. Herbert focused more on a writing style that is packed with keen observations instead of the dickering-with-big-words-pointlessly type of crap that renders WSJ and many other newspaper columnists....useless, as far as reading material goes.
Young people today are staring at a future in which they will be less well off than their elders, a reversal of fortune that should send a shudder through everyone.
That's from his last column online now, and it's something that Herbert began pointing out over three years ago. In fact, he was one of the first to aggressively note this fact, and also refer to
polls showing how many Americans believe in the reality that future generations are more screwed than Baby Boomers were, by far.
Sitting on a bench at the rec yard at Adelanto Correctional facility next to a black man in his forties, I posed the question to him that Herbert posed to me in his columns. His response was unequivocal: we've squandered our nation's potential. I asked my conservative, white, union-Democrat family back in Alabama the same thing...again, enthusiastic agreement. Bob Herbert was unafraid to speak to these realities that exist outside of D.C. cocktail parties. You'd be hard pressed to find many columnists at ANY east coast newspaper that even come CLOSE to Herbert's talents.
He was not merely a 'good' writer. With Herbert's departure, it becomes more obvious just how out-of-touch the traditional media is with everyday Americans. In this Gilded Age, the voices of the poor, oppressed, and suffering are going to be muted more and more. We will grow weary of their cries, or as they say in the 'industry', the "disaster fatigue" will kick in.
http://www.dailykos.com/...
As much as I'd like to do a tribute to the many, many good columns by Herbert, time and my clinging-to-life laptop dictate something much shorter. Shortly after a two-week vacation at LA County Jail in '08, I posted the above diary.
It could have easily been written in 2011, and likely will be applicable for an indefinite period of time in America.
June 10, 2008--Bob Herbert: "Out of Sight"
The young people I’m talking about wouldn’t have noticed. These are the teenagers and young adults — roughly 16 to 24 years old — who are not in school and basically have no hope of finding work. The bureaucrats compiling the official unemployment rate don’t even bother counting these young people. They are no one’s constituency. They might as well not exist.
Except that they do exist. There are four million or more of these so-called disconnected youths across the country. They hang out on street corners in cities large and small — and increasingly in suburban and rural areas.
If you ask how they survive from day to day, the most likely response is: “I hustle,” which could mean anything from giving haircuts in a basement to washing a neighbor’s car to running the occasional errand.
Or it could mean petty thievery or drug dealing or prostitution or worse.
This is the flip side of the American dream. The United States economy, which has trouble producing enough jobs to keep the middle class intact, has left these youngsters all-but-completely behind.
Fresh out of jail in June for a 'probation violation' (having not done my "community service' mandated by my marijuana felony plea bargain that my public defender lazily procured for me), I had $400 to my name, was crashing on some a**hole's couch due to lack of options, and hustling for food and gas money. Southern California's job market may never recover from the 2008 falling-out, and my felony wasn't making things easier. I went to hustling to get by, culminating in a 9 month prison term later that year for marijuana possession. Any hustler that gets caught is his own worst critic for letting someone less intelligent catch him, but it is what it is.
But I'm a nice guy. Try meeting the gang bangers, meth dealers, and enforcers that I met in LA County, Lancaster State Prison, or Adelanto. At least a portion of them went that route because there were no jobs for them, only jails. We talk about how young men are drawn to radicalism in the Middle East because of poverty, as if it is some kind of non-obvious, academic issue.
There's nothing academic about the drug dealers I met. I WAS an academic (I studied at the same college as NYT's Bill Keller, and got the college email address to prove it. Any by prove it, what I really mean is, be embarrassed that I even went there)
But there's nothing academic about the unemployment rate being over 20% for young people. There are no accompanying statistics for young people with felonies, as far as I am aware. But I don't need a Phd in social science to know that law enforcement needed guys like me just like the warmongers need poor young men like me abroad. As a reason to fight more wars, and keep the money flowing to the war industry.
They want to send us: the poor, the brown, the young ...to go die abroad so they can make money. They want us locked up here so they can make money. That's it.
But there's no time for me to stand in the modern American wilderness, observing the brutal ironies of the day. I've got to get out and keep hustling.
There's rent to be paid. Food to buy. Doctors to pay. Convicted felons aren't eligible for food stamps. As of 2011, there is no such thing as 'welfare' in California. At all. They're cutting CalWorks, which was about the last thing left. The only 'welfare' I received was the $200 'temporary assistance' from the County of Los Angeles one time.
Does the $200 you get when you get released count as welfare?
Do the plethora of white-collar criminals in strip malls and office buildings of Orange County, CA count as hustling? It is. Loan modification scam, debt settlement scams, telemarketing scams, and dirty politics (see: man who jumped to his death nearby in Costa Mesa...a casualty of the GOP's war on unions and public workers).
Today in the mail, I got an invitation to go meet Andrew Breitbart and Dana "crazy" Rohrabacher at Skosh Monahan's Irish Pub in Costa Mesa. 150$ per person, 250$ per couple. While the rest of us honest folk are trying to hustle a living, these rich white bastards are THE REAL HUSTLERS, as Dave Chapelle said. Andrew Breitbart is listed on the flyer as "patriot blogger hero". Guess that makes me a villian, then. [I can post a picture of the flyer if anyone wants to see it]
Here are the closing paragraphs from Herbert's June 10, 2008 column. If these words are not prescient, then what are they?
“When you get into a recession, kids always get hit the hardest. Kids always go to the back of the hiring queue. Now, they find themselves with a lot of other people in line ahead of them.”
As the ranks of these youngsters grow, so does their potential to become a destabilizing factor in the society.
More important, the U.S. needs the untapped talent (and the potential buying power) in this large pool of young people, just as it needs the talents of the many other Americans of all ages whose energy, intelligence and creativity are wasted in an economic system that is not geared toward providing jobs for everyone who wants to work.
America needs to dream bigger, and in this election year, job creation should be issue No. 1. If I were running for president, I would pull together the smartest minds I could find from government, the corporate world, the labor movement, academia, the nonprofits and ordinary working men and women to see what could be done to spark the creation of decent jobs on a scale that would bring the U.S. as close as possible to full employment.
We’ve maxed out the credit cards, floated mindlessly in stock market bubbles, refinanced mortgages to death — now’s the time to figure out how to put all Americans to work.