The Progressive’s First Responsibility

We cannot turn on the news without being bombarded with a plethora of issues, each critical to solve.  Sometimes in the maze of all these things, we lose track of what it is to be a progressive and where our first responsibility lies.

The first night after she surrendered her house to foreclosure, Sheri West endured the darkness in her Hyundai sedan. She parked in her old driveway, with her flower-print dresses and hats piled in boxes on the back seat, and three cherished houseplants on the floor. She used her backyard as a restroom.The second night, she stayed with a friend, and so it continued for more than a year: Ms. West — mother of three grown children, grandmother to six and great-grandmother to one — passed months on the couches of friends and relatives, and in the front seat of her car.

But this fall, she exhausted all options. She had once owned and overseen a group home for homeless people. Now, she succumbed to that status herself, checking in to a shelter.

“No one could have told me that in a million years: I’d wake up in a homeless shelter,” she said. “I had a house for homeless people. Now, I’m homeless.”

Growing numbers of Americans who have lost houses to foreclosure are landing in homeless shelters, according to social service groups and a recent report by a coalition of housing advocates.

Only three years ago, foreclosure was rarely a factor in how people became homeless. But among the homeless people that social service agencies have helped over the last year, an average of 10 percent lost homes to foreclosure, according to “Foreclosure to Homelessness 2009,” a survey produced by the National Coalition for the Homeless and six other advocacy groups…

Inserted from <NY Times>

This woman’s tragic tale is one among millions.  The bottom 40% of Americans own 0.2% of the wealth.  The rich enjoy all the benefits of socialism, while the poor are stuck with free enterprise.  Crony capitalism amounts to nothing more than corporate plutocracy (Rule by the very rich through corporate control of government).  The plutocrats tell you that everyone in this country has an equal opportunity to become a success.  They point to examples of fabulously wealthy people from each generation as proof.  But these examples are only very rare exceptions to the rule that the more imbalanced a society’s distribution of wealth becomes, the less opportunity exists for all but the most favored classes.

As progressives, our first responsibility is to undo the inequity in our society so that common people have more opportunity for a better life.  That means meeting people at the point of their need.  At Crooks and Liars I found an excellent video from Bernie Sanders called The Gilded Age.  Here it is.

 

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What are your thoughts on this?