I
live in a mixed-race neighborhood. I see, every day, men stand in the cold and
rain, waiting for the arrival of their day-labor employers. I see Hindus in
saris walk with Hispanic students and Black women greet Asians at the corner
strip centers. A small group of men in a neighboring apartment complex pushed
an ice cream cart along the street, every day, from February to November. Last
summer, they scrapped the pushcart for a Chevy van. In the nearly three years
I’ve lived here, I’ve seen day laborers—working six days a week for
under-the-table cash for less than minimum wage—build enough wealth to purchase
beat-up used cars that gave them a greater range to market their labor. Up on
the corner, immigrants and first-generation Americans operate small eateries,
grocery stores, beauty salons, and shops whose products and services change
with the needs of their customers. Shabby, rented storefronts in low-rent
neighborhoods house the new American entrepreneurial class. Some, like the
restaurateurs in the Maple Avenue barrio, grew their businesses into
respectable restaurant chains frequented by the same comfortable middle-class
whites who feel only they have a right to the American dream.
A
return to college in my retirement has exposed me to the work ethic of the
twenty-something generation which came of age in the worst economic recession
since the Great Depression. On campus, I see the same cooperation among
races and economic groups that I have experienced in my neighborhood. Students
of Anglo, African, Hispanic, and Asian descent study together, work together,
offer tips and aid in their drive to succeed in an economic environment in
which their representatives in Congress and a corrupt Supreme Court seek to
hold them to limited opportunities and a life of low-wage labor. In their
youthful exuberance, they feel they can overcome the obstructionists in
Congress and the selling of their government to the plunderbund by federal and
state courts.
As
a representative in the classroom of their grandfathers’ generation, I cannot
share their hope for the future, though I do not openly express my doubts. I
see a groundswell of an evangelical right-wing movement that pushes the
government to marginalize women, ethnic groups, workers, the poor, and
political-religious dissent. When I look at the current crop of presidential
primary-election candidates, I see a future of an aristocratic rule our Founder
warned us against. I see a burgeoning entrepreneurial class crushed under a
renewed gilded age—a ruthless breed of robber barons who want to
replace their seven-cents per day labor in Bangladesh with American workers
deprived of workplace safety, collective bargaining, and any opportunity to use
their own entrepreneurial skills to break free of the prison of cubicle
culture, low-wage service jobs, and sweatshop manufacturing work.
But
I can see beyond that dismal view. I keep in mind that the progressive era
followed the excesses of the Gilded Age. I know that we will not long stand for
a privileged class that lives in opulent splendor on the backs of our labor and
our taxes, while we stew in poverty. Even the evangelical crowd will come to
see that their anti-science, anti-education, anti-intellectual stance works
against them, they will sacrifice their power to force their beliefs on others
for a return to a country that the world looks to for hope of a better future.
