By John Ballard
Rocketboom gives us a three-minute glimpse into an issue not in today's headlines. Reports like this help us remember that the world is bigger than the village where we live.
An image of the young tailor with a measuring tape around his neck sticks in my mind. It reminds me of the many housekeepers, CNA's, LPN's and RN's I meet in my post-retirement job as a senior caregiver. The US is soaking up the world's unskilled, semi-skilled and skilled young people faster than a dry sponge dropped into a bucket of water.
They are a sharp contrast to the lines of well-dressed people on TV looking for jobs, some with cell phones and laptops. Reports of ten percent unemployment ring hollow to me. I'm sympathetic with those who have lost their jobs. The loss of a family member to accident or disease many be the only worse tragedy that can befall any of us. But for those who never had a job to start with, honorable low-wage work is welcome.
In the world's population those who lost good jobs are in a very small minority compared with the number born into circumstances where upward mobility and economic security are as out of reach as a trip into space or winning a lottery.
Beating up on Jimmy Carter is a cottage industry, but when it takes the voice of a former-president to get the national media to report that racist rhetoric is getting out of hand, the man stands tall in my book. He didn't mention it but I will add that a sub-text of political cowardice sucking up to the anti-immigrant crowd caters to the same slimy racist impulse.
Later...
This is from Rude Pundit. Much more at the link...
Listen: when former President Jimmy Carter, from rural Georgia in the goddamned 1920s, says something is racist, he knows what the fuck he's talking about. Can you imagine the number of toothless crackers he grew up around? No, you can't. Don't even try. Because if you didn't grow up during a time when racism was seen as the way things were, where a white person who was polite to a black person was seen as a traitor to their race, where being a dirt poor white man meant that you had to find someone to beat up on and you sure as hell weren't gonna go after the rich white people actually keeping you down, where there were more lynchings of blacks than in any other state but Mississippi, you shut the fuck up and listen to the man. Because he knows from racist.
Whatever his merits as president, Jimmy Carter already had a bonus in my book because he called the situation in the West Bank what it rapidly is coming: apartheid.
ReplyDeleteGuess if you're a national figure, you have to live into your eighties in order to be able to afford calling a spate a spate.