Living in America During Recession

QUESTION FOR AMERICA 

I know a secretary. She has three children. Her husband works for a national company.

Like millions of Americans they struggle to make their payments, and some weeks they don’t have enough. They are good people, they go to church, they love their children. But they live on the edge, day by day, week by week.

I know a young man, he has a law degree. He cannot pay his bills. There isn’t a week that goes by that he doesn’t face a crisis like a phone bill, a utility payment, a house payment that he can't pay. One day, he called me. “I need $20, or they are going to turn off our heat.”

I have a friend. She worked for me for years, and has two children, that she adopted. The week before Christmas, her employer told her just to go home, they didn’t have any work for her. She did not get paid, and she was unable to buy any Christmas gifts for her children. She told me, “My kitchen cupboard is bare. We have no food in the house."

 She is losing her house, her car, everything.

I have business friends who have lost millions. They still have their company names, but they can’t afford even to pay their employees. They have been community leaders, built towns, shopping centers, and hundreds of houses and condos. Yet they are paralyzed, and afraid to tell anyone, lest their bankers should call their notes, and they too be cast on the streets. They are living only on the credit their bankers allow, and it is dwindling to nothing.

If our nation, America is so rich. If we can afford to spend billions on a war, and billions building schools, roads and utility systems for other nations where the people hate us... If we can give hundreds of millions to a land that has been hit by earthquake... If we can spend billions on drones, rockets, and bombs to destroy.

Why are working Americans, so poor?

What does our nation offer that secretary, and her three little girls?

What does our nation offer a young man who had the initiative to get a law degree, yet can’t make a living, because his clients no longer have money?

What does our nation offer a woman, who wants to work, who can’t even buy a Christmas present for her children?

What does our nation offer my business friends, who daily are grinding toward bankruptcy?

I do not know. All I know, is there is something terribly wrong here and now.

And there are no solutions in sight.

When hope dims, and promise fails. What is left?