We left them behind, the poor and disenfranchised. They were angry and hurt. Their lives included plenty of suffering. They could not make ends meet. If they could hang onto a job, either because they could handle the bad treatment or because the supervisor was decent, they couldn’t get a raise. They are Americans, tens of thousands of them. They work at Walmart, Amazon and Sears and every other department store. They work for McDonald’s, Papa John’s Pizza and Kentucky Fried Chicken and all the other fast food places in America. They work for $7.50 an hour and felt lucky when they launched up to $10.00 per hour.
You don’t have to tell them not to buy a Star Bucks coffee daily, they wouldn’t dream of it. They already know better. They are responsible for the used ‘everything’ market. They won’t buy a new washing machine or dryer, not when they can go to Fred’s repair shop and pick up a used one for a couple of hundred dollars. You won’t find them at the Clinique counter at Macy’s or Dillard’s, they know better.
They don’t go to the hair dresser or the barber, instead they cut each other’s hair. They can’t afford the fanciness of the “stylist”.
Because they are the poor, their children join the military. It is the only way to get a life if you have no money for college. Because they join the military, it is the poor who are maimed, dismembered or killed in combat. They are the few that pay the price for rich men’s conflicts.
Maybe you don’t see them, maybe you don’t know them. They are the working poor and there are millions of them in America.
Our society has never treated them right. They have always struggled for health care and in fact are the ones who die from lack of health care. America’s dirty little secret is that the most dangerous risk factor associated with death from breast cancer is poverty, not genetics, not DNA, poverty. This fact has been true since the early nineties. It doesn’t matter how healthy you are when you receive the diagnosis, without treatment, you die from this fatal disease.
On top of the general hell that poverty is, add on that the poverty stricken are the whipping post for all of society’s problems. The poor are treated badly by everyone. Our culture has built a myth around the idea that if you work hard you will be rewarded and rewarded well. Of course, this is a horrible American lie. Working hard will get you hard work only. You may or may not be rewarded. The other side of this myth is that if you are not successful, there must be something wrong with you. America is wonderful, so YOU are wrong if you are not successful. Never mind the minimum wage, or even the fact that all around you are people who will take from you. YOU are the problem because you are poor.
We aren’t all rocket scientists. We cannot all go to college. Just because someone works at Papa John’s Pizza, must that person live a life of poverty? Doesn’t the full time, hard work and contribution of their lives mean a decent life? Why are those at the bottom of the economic ladder ridiculed, shamed and blamed because of their poverty?
Why has this country decided to allow congress to artificially deflate the minimum wage? Congressmen and Senators are paid by big businesses. Congress keeps their promises to big business and refuses to increase the minimum wage. No one is more hurt by these actions than those millions of people who work for those same big businesses. Congress should be working for Americans, but instead works for big business and the dollar bill.
The poor have felt powerless for generations. Donald Trump came along and pretended to give them power. He gave them attention and told them that he would do for them. He is a liar, but they don’t care, because finally, they have some perceived power.
We can’t blame Donald Trump for his following. We – the wealthy and middle class America – gave him his following. We have ignored the poor and poverty stricken for decades. Worse yet, as managers and supervisors, we are mean grandstanders who put people down. We are not nice to servers and maids and bellmen. We make sure they know they are a step down.
We really needed attention on these central and critical issues. America cannot continue to ignore poverty stricken Americans. America should not be ignoring poverty stricken people who are dying from illnesses that can be cured with care. We must begin taking accountability for what we have acculturated in America.
We cannot continue to work at having a class of people to step on and to be “better than”. We must get real about our commitment to equality. We must begin to give everyone a place at the table. We must make sure that all have food and health care.
Before Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders was a voice in the wilderness. Now, he is the most coherent candidate of all. Income inequality has increased unabated since the Reagan era. It took Donald Trump to show us how nasty and divisive it is for the American people.
