Every single day that I campaign, someone comes up to me in the streets and says, "can you get me a job?". On one day this past weekend, I got literally a couple of dozen of those questions. The desperation in peoples' voices is more urgent than I have heard in a long, long time of working on economic justice. So, this news was not entirely shocking to me.
Just now:
A financially desperate woman in South Carolina has confessed to smothering her two children with her bare hands and driving their bodies into a river, the police said on Tuesday morning.
The woman, Shaquan Duley, 29, admitted to killing her 2-year-old and 18-month-old sons after the police pulled her submerged car from a river in Orangeburg, S.C., and discovered their bodies, according to Larry Williams, the county sheriff.
"The statement was made by the mother that she had suffocated the children," Sheriff Williams said at a press conference. "She was a mother that was unemployed. She had no way of taking care of her children."
I don't know whether Duley had other challenges in her life, emotional or otherwise. And I certainly do not condone murder, whatever the circumstances. But, the fact that she could not find a job and had no place to turn speaks to the desperation in America today.
I am not suggesting that people who can't find a job are going to take the steps that Duley took and I am not here to lionize her. But, her act simply evoked, in an extreme act, the voices of all the people I talk to in the streets: people who do not know what to do, or where to turn, to make it.
Politicians can fund immoral wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and flush three trillion dollars down the drain and continue to build a permanent war economy--but they can't find the billions of dollars we need to get people meaningful work.
Companies can record rising profits--but they do so often these days by cutting workers of the payroll, and preparing to proceed on with fewer workers.
Wall Street proceeds on its merry way, barely scratched in the "financial reform", and will now rev up its engine of leverage buyouts and takeovers for "efficiency" sake--guaranteeing that fewer and fewer people will have decent-paying work and the desperation will grow.
Rather than ask that those who robbed the country pay back a little of their booty, we are asking the victims of the robbery to pay for the robbery--whether by cutting Social Security (coming to a legislative bill soon), pensions, Medicare and a whole lot more that we should hold sacred.
I could not help but think of Henry Ford's admonishment that he could get half the working class to kill the other half. The people are so desperate that the pundits and the elite who robbed the country have convinced the victims that the real enemy are other victims. That is the only way to explain the spectacle of the attack on public employee pensions--an attack on people who want to retire with some dignity and respect but are now the symbol somehow of excess.
And so I wonder if Duley, or others, just look around and say, "I have nowhere to turn".