Waging Forgotten Wars
Let's put some of America's wealth to work
building good schools and health care systems;
securing living-wage and union-wage jobs;
and providing decent housing...
By William Lucy
In a world filled with uncertainties, there’s one thing I count on — and I base this on 30 years of personal experience: Whenever the Rev. Jesse Jackson comes to town, he’ll be railing against injustice, against intolerance, against greed — against all the enemies of the American Dream.
Reverend Jackson has been a friend of AFSCME since the union’s first big campaigns to organize hospital workers and to support the civil rights marches of the 1960s. He was with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis supporting striking AFSCME members on that terrible day in 1968 when King was assassinated. Last August, he again addressed the union’s Conven-tion and reminded us of a war that America has chosen to forget — the War on Poverty — and the families that “progress” has left behind: the families trapped in the inner cities by red-lining, the farm families steamrolled by agribusiness, the factory workers who have seen their jobs vanish over the horizon, the millions who don’t have a pot to cook in or bootstraps to tug on.
Appalachia was one of the main fronts of the War on Poverty. Remember Appalachia? Hill country — 200,000 square miles stretching over 13 states from New York to Mississippi. The War on Poverty was going to march into those hollows and fix things. The government did manage to build 3,000 miles of good highways. Today, 30 years later, truckers and travelers can zip right by crumbling trailer homes with neither good water nor good sanitation. One in five children live in poverty. The high school dropout rate is 33 percent. The area suffers the nation’s highest rate of death from black- and brown-lung disease.
Unemployment is not too much higher than the rest of the nation, but the union factory jobs have vanished down Mexico way, and a good many union miners have been replaced by machines. There are new jobs, but they are in the largely non-union and low-paid service sector. In much of Appalachia, a job at McDonald’s is not the start but the finish.
So what’s going on? Simply put, we have lost the moral strength and the political will it takes to do something about America’s hollows and Harlems.
It’s not a matter of money. We’ve got a federal surplus. Most states are flush. We bail out Russia, China, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, sundry nations in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Latin America and Africa, plus reckless banks and big investors.
It’s not that we need the dollars for defense. We’re the last superpower standing. According to the Right-Wing masters of Congress, we can afford to lay out billions for military grants and loans to foreign countries, but we can’t afford to raise the minimum wage. We can afford giant tax breaks for Bill Gates and his soulmates, but we can’t afford job training for people hanging on by their fingernails.
As Reverend Jackson put it at our Convention, “Let’s bail out America for a change.” Let’s finish the War on Poverty. Let’s put some of America’s wealth to work building good schools and health care systems; securing living-wage and union-wage jobs; and providing decent housing, in Appalachia and Harlem and everywhere else where people have been left behind. Let’s mobilize our institutions — government, churches, unions, universities, corporations — to build a good, solid house big enough for all the American people. I don’t think that’s impossible.
Bobby Kennedy had a saying I’ve always related to: “Some men see things as they are, and say ‘Why?’ I dream things that never were and say, ‘Why not?’”
Let’s bail out America. Why not?
