Trauma for Working Class in America: Fray or Distraction?

[Better Believe It]

Trauma for Working Class in America: Fray or Distraction?
by Donna Smith
Donna Smith is a community organizer for National Nurses United and National Co-Chair for the Progressive Democrats of America Healthcare Not Warfare campaign.
March 8, 2011

All over America, working class people are trying hard just to maintain. Jobs are not plentiful. Good jobs are less so. Most experts on the economy think it will be years, if ever, before the U.S. economy recovers to the point where unemployment dips much below 8 percent.

Part of me wants to believe that some of our elected officials are apart from and somehow above this cultural worship of wealth and stardom. But in reading this week about what our President and his staff think really matters, I saw this piece by Jackie Calmes of the New York Times:

“Administration officials said they saw such events beyond Washington as distractions from the optimistic ‘win the future’ message Mr. Obama introduced with his State of the Union address, exhorting the country to increase spending.”

Surely, surely, we don’t see the children CBS reported on from Central Florida as distractions, do we? The homeless kids elsewhere in America? The jobless? How about the hundreds still dying every day in America who lack access to healthcare when they need it? Distractions, one and all?

Read the full article at:

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/03/08-3

[coalition_unwilling]

1. You obviously don't know how to play 16-dimension chess, where

sacrificing the pawns (working class) benefits someone down the road somewhere.

Screw that. I want to win the present and smash the fascists right now.