The New Entrepeneurs

Photo by Thijs Degenkamp on Unsplash

 

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.