Gone are the days when the kid flipping your burger was putting in ten hours a week to tank up with thirty-nine cents a gallon gas to cruise the main drag. Things have changed.
She grew up, went to school, did all those right things her mom and dad told her to do. Finished her education. Got a good job. Got married and three years down the road she and her husband had a couple of great kids. Bought that starter house. Put away some cash for those first couple years for the kids' tuition. Decades past. Things were looking good.
That's when the offensive matter got flung into the whirling blades of the worst recession since the Great Depression. His job was offshore. She got downsized. Not giving a damn, The First Bank of Calloused Indifference foreclosed.
Well, at least they could move into mom and dad's basement. And there was unemployment insurance; until it ran out. Food stamps; till those cheap-assed SOBs in Congress cut the program by fourteen billion while giving themselves a raise.
I didn't make this up. These are my neighbors; probably yours too. You know them. Your kids played soccer with theirs last summer. They aren't moochers trying to screw you out of your tax dollars. What they had they earned; built from the bottom up. Now they're back down there again. Starting over's a bitch; always has been. But if that's what it takes, they're willing.
They don't need a hand out. Don't want one. They're looking for a hand up. That's why she's flipping burgers at Micky D's for as many hours as they'll give her. He's doing overnights at Wally World restocking aisle four. And there's not a day they don't network, search the ads, looking... and looking... and hoping no one gets really sick because these multi-billion dollar a year corporate greed heads keep their hours just below the line where they'd be required--rightly so--to provide a modicum of health insurance.
These are our neighbors. They deserve more than $7.25 hr. Minimum wage they call it. Good name. Minimum means you just miss pushing your belongings around the square in a shopping cart, if you have relatives who can take you in, and staying out of the soup kitchen but not the parish food pantry. They are our neighbors and they deserve a hand up. They deserve that $10.10 minimum wage. It's not a livable wage but at the very least it's a step in the right direction. We owe them that much.
It's a moral issue. "Suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to him, 'Go, I wish you well; keep warm and well fed,' but does nothing about his physical needs, what good is it?" (James 2:15-16) Like it or not, I am my brother's and my sister's keeper. I may be an atheist, a humanist, a Christian, or Hindu, or Jew, or Buddhist, or Muslim. Truth is, I cannot avoid the ethical fact that as a member of the human race I am obligated to accept moral responsibility for the health and well being of my neighbors.
According to Arindrajit Dube, who released a study produced by U. Mass-Amherst earlier this year, taking seriously that responsibility by facilitating an increase to $10.10 hr. minimum wage; I can help reduce the number of our nation's poor by 6.8 million.
Numbers impress. But what impresses more is knowing each one, each and every one, has a name, a face, a belly to be filled and a body that needs to keep warm at night.
When things get bad, neighbors need to be able to count on one another. That's why I'm doing all I can to push for $10.10 an hour--minimum. Because it's the right thing to do.
The Jawbone
