Well here’s some good news to begin the week — Senator Bernie Sanders lays out his case for economic justice in the New York Times.
He relates his political and economic agenda to his childhood. His family was poor, always penny pinching, looking for bargains. Yet, they had a roof over their heads due to rent control whereas so many of us today struggle in gentrifying neighborhoods to pay rent, often paying half or more of everything we earn just for shelter.
Here is an excerpt:
My father came to this country from Poland at the age of 17 with barely a nickel in his pocket. I spent my first 18 years, before I left home for college, in a three-and-a-half-room, rent-controlled apartment in Brooklyn. My mother’s dream was to own her own home, but we never came close. My father’s salary as a paint salesman paid for basic necessities, but never much more.
As a young man I learned the impact that lack of money had on family life. Every major household purchase was accompanied by arguments between my parents.
I remember being yelled at for going to the wrong store for groceries and paying more than I should have. I’ve never forgotten the incredible stress of not having much money, a reality that millions of American families experience today.
www.nytimes.com/…
I think Bernie’s argument is strengthened by his personal experience. I don’t doubt that people from wealthy backgrounds can also be compassionate and progressive, but there’s something about having really experienced economic struggle that gives weight to Bernie’s struggle to improve the lives of Americans.
Certainly there is nothing pretty about struggling like this. He mentions the arguments in his family — well that’s a real thing. And today, with an economy that is supposedly booming, as Bernie mentions in his piece all too many of us have no savings and can’t scrabble up cash for emergencies.
He says,
Today our rate of childhood poverty is among the highest of any developed country in the world, millions of workers are forced to work two or three jobs just to survive, hundreds of thousands of bright young people cannot afford to go to college, millions more owe outrageous levels of student debt, and half a million people are homeless on any given night. Over 80 million Americans have inadequate health insurance or spent part or all of last year without any insurance, and one out of five cannot afford the prescription drugs they need.
This is a shanda.
So is the ever increasing wealth and income inequality in the US, with wages having been essentially flat for decades the real cost of living has outpaced what we can earn. And we now experience generational poverty and a real class system, which until recently we flat didn’t mention in polite discourse because as well all know, America isn’t supposed to have a class system.
I’m glad that Bernie is speaking out, that he has been speaking out, because whether or not he’s our Democratic candidate in 2020 he will have opened the door to a discussion that we are long, long overdue in having, and that is a good long look in the American mirror at capitalism, at the fact that socialism is a dirty word, and at the fact that economic mobility is not best in the US, it’s actually very hard to make any economic gains.
Liz Warren in particular has a plan for that:)
So regardless of how the race shapes up let’s keep working for a better future. I don’t want to give up on us just yet, though these are times that do indeed try the soul — Senator Bernie Sanders has a firm, clear vision of what’s right and as long as we don’t let ourselves get too freaked out and too depressed about you know who we can work to save this beautiful country.