Two Hundred Thirty-Four years have passed since the Declaration of Independence asserted the independence and freedom of Americans. Since that signal declaration, two hundred thirty-four long years, countless struggles and a dozen wars have paraded along the path of history. Yet today, shamefully still today, millions of Americans are not yet free.
They remain in the bondage of want, chained to the endless pursuit of the most fundamental human needs which still, somehow, remain just beyond their reach. They are daily whipped and beaten by the scourge of worry, fear of the future and the merciless oppression of capitalism run amok. While the country celebrates its 234th birthday, Independence Day is yet to come for these millions of Americans. Freedom has not yet passed down their street.
As we celebrate Independence Day 2010, 7.7 million American families are behind in their mortgage payments. Not a little behind, but a lot. Two payments or more. In addition to the millions of American families who lost their homes to foreclosure last year another 5 million will experience the forcible taking of their homes in the coming year.
Stop and appreciate what is happening here. We are talking about the homes of many millions of Americans—homes where people young and old live, family homes where hopeful people raised their children and built their lives. The safe and secure sanctuaries of men and women and children, where dreams are born and love and life are inseparable. Understand that the homes of millions of families will be legally seized by bailed-out Wall Street bankers, and the newly homeless and desperate will look on as their belongings are pitched to the curb by sheriff’s deputies, whose salaries they pay.
America’s patrician class, the beneficiaries of government bailout largesse, will enjoy record profits and an embarrassment of riches this Independence Day. They will bask in the freedoms and choices reserved for the Haves. Plebians will live the lives of common people, lives bound and gagged by worry and want, longing for the freedoms that common men and women in America cannot buy.
Congress, both the Senate and the House of the People, have responded to the foreclosure crisis by giving distressed borrowers the one-finger salute, the proverbial finger. While Wall Street bankers tie struggling homeowners to the railroad tracks, Congress provides billions of dollars to fuel the locomotive of corporate greed and corruption that has steamrolled the American dream.
If you are lucky enough not to be among them, perhaps you can imagine the worry hanging today like a malevolent cloud of doom in the homes of 1.3 million Americans whose financial lifeline, their meager unemployment benefits checks, will vaporize this week. It is a callous, cruel and damnable thing to play politics with the lives of desperate families, but not beneath the moral bar of 38 Republican senators who filibustered all efforts to extend unemployment benefits before Congress recessed for the July 4th holiday. Unemployed Americans whose checks will be cut off by Republican obstructionism will likely be in no mood for hotdogs or fireworks today. They will have more fundamental things on their minds.
At a time when unemployment is at its highest level since the Great Depression, Republicans have slammed the door and spit in the faces of hard working Americans, victims of layoffs and plant closings, all productive citizens whose work records earned them unemployment benefits in the first place. Many of the unemployed and now forgotten are veterans. Others are family men and women with children to feed. All are human beings. All are American citizens. All of them have to eat. None of them can afford freedom.
Despite great noise, fanfare and public commotion last fall and winter, 40 million Americans remain today without health care. Sick people are getting sicker, and every day a fair number of them die. In the Land of the Free it seems that everything, especially health care, costs money. Rather a lot of money. More money than poor people can pay, even when the alternative is suffering and death.
“Necessitous men are not free men,” Franklin Roosevelt told a war weary nation looking with fond hope at the promise of freedom, finally to be enjoyed by all once the Great War was won. Jobs with dignity and a fair, living wage. Health care, education and a clean, affordable place to live. Food on the table and a life filled with opportunity. These were the the things for which our Greatest Generation fought. They are the things for which the common man and woman yet yearn. They are the promise, as yet unfulfilled, at the heart of the American dream.
Americans are proud of freedom. We proclaim it loudly and often. We fly the flag and stand for the national anthem, and we send our young off to war to die in freedom’s name. And, yet, in our heart of heart we know that for millions American freedom isn’t real. It never has been. It is as vaporous as the unemployment benefits that will not come next week.
Still, hope abides that one day things may be different. The hope has sustained the nation for 234 years. May today be the day that a new day dawns in America. It is the prayer that rises from the hearts of those who truly love this country.
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Glad to see you back! It looks like you survived the move. Too bad you can’t rest now. You’ve got a lot of catch-up blogging to do!
Hey Prentice, it’s good to read something new by you on “Perkerson Park”! (It was also so-o-o-o go-o-o-od to see you & Mary Ann at church last Sun.) And as usual, your article here is very well-written. It kind of hits home for yours truly, not that I have a home in danger of foreclosure but that I’m a couple months behind in my rent & cannot purchase lots of things I really need — forget about things I’d like but don’t need! The wolf’s howling at my door, too. . . .