https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0uZCvIpW4s

Hysterical meltdown? Really? I would like to know when some righteous indignation and anger over injustice has become unacceptable behavior?  The wealthy in this country receive public assistance in the form of tax breaks, and more forgiving bankruptcy laws, and the ability to re-finance. Lots and lots of “do-overs” for a bad decision. The poor in this country do not have a safety net anymore. Bill Clinton’s welfare reform, and Barack Obama’s welfare reforms and Ronald Reagan’s welfare reforms have not addressed the real problems or provided any kind of ladder out of poverty. If you want people to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, you’d better make sure they have boots first. 

In the case of the working poor in the United States, major corporations like Walmart are allowed to pay minimum wage to their employees, obligating the State to subsidize their labor force.

Let’s make something clear. Human beings have a limited life span. When you work, you are sacrificing a portion of your limited life span in exchange for funds that should allow you to support yourself. Why does any organization or company begrudge a person a wage, based on the knowledge that you are asking a person to sacrifice a part of their life to help you build your organization?  Secondly, why should any company be allowed to hire a person at anything less than a wage that will allow them to sustain their own life at a minimum?  

Those who will undoubtedly chime in with the seductive reasoning of “Free Market Economics”, I dare you to take a month out of your life, move to a city where you have no resources, and try to exist on the current minimum wage. You must provide transportation, housing, and child care if you have a child. You must provide food and clothing.

Even if you can do that, you have the relief of the idea that your torment has a countdown. That you can just get through the month and you are back to your normal, comfortable life.

The working poor have no such countdown. 

A lucky few will find their way out of grinding poverty, but the majority will stay in poverty, bear children into poverty, and die in poverty.

Am I a “Liberal?”  Hell yes. Am I proud to say it? Hell yes!  Why?  Because Liberals understand that we are all part of a community, and the selfish idea that Conservatives have that they’ve “done it all themselves” does not acknowledge the infrastructure that supports us, the resources that are available to some that are not available to all, and the mistaken idea that we can leave people behind and expect to succeed as a society.

When an angry person speaks truth, silence falls. What I like about this video is the panel, in the face of truth and anger, can not help but be silent and listen.

I would like to see more of this kind of truth told.

Maybe then, we may begin to move forward as a society, rather than as factions who are “right” and “wrong,” allowing people to be left behind because they are in some way un-deserving or un-belonging to the only “Race” that really exists – The Human Race.