Getting By In America

So the posting was light today because I was doing my Christmastime good deed, pitching in on a food drive for needy families in South Central L.A. Every year the nonprofit One Voice reaches about 2,500 families in the area with a holiday food basket.

And this year, that bounty is apparently more needed than ever, because I keep hearing about epic demand at our nation's food banks. For too many, it is a struggle to survive without help in America. Costs are rising faster than wages, despite an unemployment rate that doesn't count people who've stopped looking for work jobs are tight and the underground economy isn't paying the bills, and the mortgage crisis is raising rents all over the country as demand increases. Donations are not keeping up with need, either.

Where there used to be thriving suburbs there are now tent cities.

Between railroad tracks and beneath the roar of departing planes sits "tent city," a terminus for homeless people. It is not, as might be expected, in a blighted city center, but in the once-booming suburbia of Southern California.

The noisy, dusty camp sprang up in July with 20 residents and now numbers 200 people, including several children, growing as this region east of Los Angeles has been hit by the U.S. housing crisis.

The unraveling of the region known as the Inland Empire reads like a 21st century version of "The Grapes of Wrath," John Steinbeck's novel about families driven from their lands by the Great Depression.

As more families throw in the towel and head to foreclosure here and across the nation, the social costs of collapse are adding up in the form of higher rates of homelessness, crime and even disease.

I don't think people have an understanding of how bad it is out there. There was a house a few months back that was being transported here in Los Angeles, and it fell off the truck on the 101 and stayed there for a couple weeks. People started living in it. There are families who are finding it easier to turn in their keys and walk away from their homes. It's obscenely easy to become invisible in America, whether you're desperately poor or even middle class. And there's a fine line between ignorance and a flat-out lack of compassion. And yes, in many ways the U.S. economy is built that way.

The entire American economy is based on making people feel bad about themselves, making them feel poor, ugly, sick, helpless, stupid, inadequate and then offering to sell them something to relieve the pain of rejection and failure.

It's based on making them afraid, too. Of losing the aforementioned house/health insurance/paycheck and of the myriad of boogymen under our collective beds. You think we don't have national health care because we can't do it or can't afford it? We don't have national health care because if we did, quitting your job and moving on to something better or even to the unknown wouldn't be so fucking terrifying. Some American dream, huh?

Meanwhile, as the poor are shunted aside, the rich are feted. Circuit City, perhaps the biggest bastards in the business world, who fired all their workers who made any kind of decent wage and hired neophytes for less, couldn't be losing more money if they tried. Nobody wants to go to an electronics store where nobody has a clue what they're doing. Turns out the management tried to hire back their informed employees to no avail. And all this loss for their shareholders hasn't hurt the suits a bit.

We all know what happens when you mess up in the dog eat dog world of big business -- you get retention awards (that's because your stock options aren't worth anything). The Post reports that Circuit City's executive vice-presidents will get retention awards of $1 million each. That's 35 years worth of pay for one of sales clerks who earned $14 an hour. And that's just the bonus.

This touching account of Santa Claus visiting Circuit City's executive suites belonged on the front page of the Post and every other newspaper. What better way to get in the Christmas spirit?

America is on a bad track and the suits on Wall Street can't seem to understand why. The gap between rich and poor is unreal, and the media isn't covering any kind of real labor and class issues that would put this in front of people's eyes. As a result people feel almost completely alone.