"I heard this just in passing this week, but
unemployment in Flint, Michigan has edged over 30 percent, and Detroit
seems to be coming up hard on the rail. If you drive around this country,
or if you travel it by rail, a lot of the most poignant places through
which you will pass are the small- and medium-sized cities of the Midwest,
with the empty, blank-staring factories. (A closed steel-mill is a ruin
almost incomprehensibly vast.) Close your eyes, and you can hear the
machines grinding, and the workers yapping about the Tigers or the Indians,
or the Bears or the Packers. You can see the plant gates open, and the lunch pails swinging from dangling fingertips, and maybe the kids running
excitedly up the sidewalk, anxious to carry the steel helmet or put on the
tool-belt. A middle-class came out of those gates, every day, for 30 years,
and a stronger country came out of that middle-class, and out of the GI
Bill. Rolling by those places today is to wander through the lost archaeology of your own country, in real time.
Thirty percent unemployment is not a sustainable society. Deeper in
those numbers you will find dramatic increases in domestic violence, in
alcoholism and drug addiction, and an accelerated breeder reactor of
failure and apathy, feeding on itself, the self-sustaining manufacture of a
century of despair. People who cannot work cannot eat. People who cannot
eat will not vote. Why? What is possibly in it for them? What in the name
of god is their place in the glittering kabuki of what has become of our
politics? They're not buying tables at the Correspondents Dinner. They're
not buying anything advertised on the cable shows. They're not sending big
checks to President Change-I-Am. They don't count, those 30 percent, not
any more, and the empty mills rust, flake, and blow away in fragments in
the winds that are turning colder.
We are on the precipice of something very dangerous right now.
Thirty percent is not the stuff of a sustainable, credible political
democracy, which I suppose is OK, since we don't have one any more, and
show no signs of being particularly upset about that self-evident fact. We
saw that this week. The United States of America, which once fed its people
and armed the world in order that it could save itself, is unequal in its
self-government to the simple task of keeping its citizens healthy and
alive. In the task of self-government, the unemployment rate is nearing 100
percent."
-The indomitable Charles P. Pierce
Too bad fixing the job situation is probably task #3 or #4 on Obama's list. The Republican opposition mentions it a little more than the Dems, but not much.
ReplyDeleteWhomever addresses this properly in 2010 will probably do well.