Making Sacrifices to Save the America We Love

In a scene from the movie "Hope and Glory", after yet another night of German air raids over their previously quiet, residential street, neighbors carry items of clothing and buckets of food to the latest piles of rubble to replace the homes of their neighbors. Everyone is on rations. Anyone's home could be hit next, but with the characteristic pluck of the British in the disappearing shadow of the Empire, people who've been exchanging clothes at the local church for months already themselves look into their closets for things they don't absolutely need, and they share.

During time of crisis; hurricanes, fires, earthquakes, Americans behave the same way, more or less. We go help rebuild. We take in relatives, strangers, pets of the displaced and we share what we have until things get better. Somehow, unless there is a tragedy, we don't always notice that things are pretty bad for a lot of people right in our midst though. The hearty folks who stayed in London during the blitz, who didn't parcel their children out to Australia and America and Ireland, endured day after day, month after month, year after year. Deprivation was the norm, so little luxuries, jam found after a plane crash, a cake scrabbled together from questionable sources, seemed regal. People enjoyed people more than they enjoyed things. Things, they understood, could be swept away in a moment, and of course, so could loved ones, so to which do you cling?

Well folks, it may not have levelled my roof yet, but the blitz is on and it has been for some time. For the last year or so I've noticed more and more homeless people aggressively panhandling me on K Street in downtown Sacramento as I rush to the capitol for a hearing or as I try to sit with my two good friends on the patio of a coffee house enjoying ice tea. A few times someone hasn't just walked up to us on the outside of the wrought iron railing that divides the cafe patio from the plaza walkway to ask for money, but a person, sometimes a woman, sometimes a man, has sat right down at our table. I suppose we look well tended. But, the reality is, one of my friends has been struggling with her older son's schizophrenia, his incarceration, hospitalization and relapse while in a halfway house. Her face bears the well hideen scars of the savage beating she took at his hands when he had his first major psychotic break. My other friend is struggling with her husband to manage their blended family, to try to help their children get educated, find a place in the world, and sustain the two careers required to provide for a large family. And I am a single parent, a cancer survivor, trying like everyone else to hold on to a home whose value has dropped as I shoulder skyrocketing costs of healthcare for my children, including one who is chronically ill.

When a woman sits down in our midst and begins to tell us the same sad story she told us weeks before about how she just needs the few dollars to get out to Kaiser South hospital on light rail to see her dying mother, I am both angry and concerned. Two months ago I gave this woman my light rail pass, since she said she needed money for light rail. She held the piece of paper in her hand and looked up at me and asked, "What am I supposed to do with this?" My friend with the blended family always gives a little money. Her heart breaks over the many mentally ill people she sees on the streets, those hawking the homeless sheet for fifty cents or a dollar. This is how we treat the mentally ill. This is where they end up, on our streets, disenfranchised. My other friend is the lifeline for her own son. Without her money, without her persistence, he ends up on the street, without treatment, without medication. We see the very fine line clearly, all three of us.

My friend who just can't say no, even though she knows the stories are false, is a very conservative Republican. It doesn't matter that there is no mother in Kaiser South Hospital to her. It doesn't matter that this young man and his family haven't been recently robbed ashe claims over and over again, week after week. What matters to her is that they really do need help. They need much more help than we can give them with a few dollars here and there, and likely the little help they get on the streets only keeps them tied to that life, not yet desperate enough to reach out for some other more permanent lifeline.

In our country 'welfare' has become a bad word. Designed as a safety net to catch people falling out of the middle class or tumbling from low income homes into adulthood - it has been denigrated as a catch all for the lazy. I suppose at times, when the economy was on the upswing, it appeared we were 'carrying' some people who could easily carry themselves. I suppose there are always those who will be carried if someone is willing to do it for them, and they aren't just people on welfare or other forms of assistance. But, as we walk to and from the state capitol and as we conduct our daily lives, we see the evidence of how many more people are falling through the cracks. We see growing numbers of them not likely to ever come back unless something drastically changes. We have seen our own friends lose their jobs to down-sizing and seen the faces change from patience to perseverence to desperation as the months drag on and on for them looking for honest work to support their families. We are all one phone call, one notice on the door of our buildings, one layoff away from joining these ranks.

We are those people whose houses didn't get bombed into oblivion last night. We are the next door neighbors. We're the ladies letting out hems and re-inforcing zippers and beginning to save the oldest child's outgrown shoes for the next child. We're the people who, before the bad times, shopped at Nordstrom, gave generously to charity, held lavish holiday parties. But, then the bad times came and even though they didn't get us with a direct hit, the evidence of their devastation is everywhere.

I've been going through the closets in our home as I do every few months, stacking up the outgrown clothes, the out of style dresses, the shoes so filled with dust I know they will not be worn again. Usually I put these clothes into bags and take them to Goodwill or St. Vincent De Paul. But, right now I am just collecting everything. I'm fixing flat tires on the bikes my son is too big for now, gathering up the helmets we don't wear, the rollerblades no one can squeeze into, the coats from the back of the closet. Certainly I will still give some of these things to thrift stores and charities, but I believe the time has come to eliminate the middle man some of the time. At my office one of the legal secretaries has a box by her desk for her local food closet, where donations are indeed down. Tonight I clean out the pantry and gather everything I can for her. I think it's time to start flea markets everywhere, where you don't have to sell anything if you don't want to - just give it to someone who can use it. Can't we just all go to some park or parking lot and see what we have that someone else needs, and visa versa?

When I was a child I thought nothing of putting on a pair of pants that used to belong to one of my older sisters. One of my favorite dresses, a light blue cotton one with a matching sweater with a delicate brown lining, was worn by no less than two previous siblings. My first bicycle was given to my mother by the man who drove the bus that brought work crews to clear out the ditches in our neighborhood. I was too small for the bike my older sisters were still riding and I was ready to learn. My mom mentioned this to the man as she brought him a glass of water, and he said the next day he'd have a bike that belonged to one of his grandchildren. Sure enough, the next day there it was in our driveway. It was a boys' bike. It was the first two wheeler I ever rode. Yesterday I was having lunch with a vice president at AT&T and he gently tried to talk me into buying his Jaguar when I mentioned I didn't know how long I could hold out before having to buy a new car. Last night as I lay in bed I was thinking about how I'm no different than that five year old child who eagerly got on some stranger's bike and proudly rode it for years until I was too hopelessly tall to fit on it. I don't buy Jaguars. I've owned a few new cars in my lifetime, but mostly I buy something someone has already broken in, something that's already depreciated a little but still has plenty of wear and is fuel efficient, and I haggle over the price and I pay cash. It's who I am. I wasn't raised to throw things away or to scoff at a gift that might have been used before.

I know the sacrifices I will have to make to ensure my family's security. I know how to scale back and have been able to do this throughout my life whenever circumstances required doing so, and I've tried to stretch out thriftiness even in times of plenty. Even with all this thrift though, I have more than I need, And plenty of people don't have enough. If our Treasury can bail out banks why can't I bail out my neighbor? Why can't I help him forestall disaster or deprivation?
All of my life, even when I've sold things like a car I'm not using any more or maybe a bike, I've always sold it for a fair price, a low price, much less than the 'market' would have borne. I've tried to take out of a situation only what I need, not all I can get. To do more, to extract more, is contrary to my basic morality.
I realize now that I have to extract even less going forward. More has to be just given, because it can be given and it should be given.

When my son and I drive home from downtown on weekdays we pass an area not far from the site of the California State Fair, an area just off the freeway and near the railroad tracks that is dotted with tents and makeshift homes. Just three years okay it was a clean landscape. Initially my son mistook the camps for leisure sites and he asked his older sister why people would choose to camp so close to the freeway when there are campgrounds in better areas. Now that he knows people are living there because they have nowhere else to live, he worries about their safety. He's seen the scorched earth, smelled the pungent aroma after a grass fire swept through the area. He knows of murders - stabbings, shootings. He knows the difference between the safety of locked doors in a good neighborhood and living in the open air where a van full of angry teenagers and their chains and bats could be the last thing you ever see or feel in your life. My son knows this. We all know this. And yet, we do not act. We sit and stew in our anger and resentment and in our righteously held view that our place at the table is being taken by someone else, someone less deserving. We yearn for our way of life to return, for our views to prevail, for our comfort level to be restored once and for all.

The truth is, there is no sustained comfort, no guaranteed security. There is only the world we build for ourselves and for each other. We see the houses lying fallow, empty, degrading. We see the long faces, the crazy eyes, we smell the overpowering pungence of human despair passing us on the streets and we avert our eyes. We have our own problems. All of the things we have worked hard to achieve are slipping through our hands. This is exactly the time to hold on to each other. We are all we have, we are all we will ever be alone or together as a society. We are Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, the Treasury Department, The Democratic Party, the Republican Party, and we are the homeless, the foreclosed, the children without health care, the cold people without coats sleeping under freeways. We are the America we love. What are we doing?

In Nebraska nineteen children have been discarded at hospitals since July, nineteen preteens and teens, under a safe haven law intended to allow people to 'choose life' and bring an unwanted child into the world and not discard it. Instead of crossing state lines to get healthcare people are crossing state lines to drop their children off for someone else to take care of since they aren't up to it any more. These are OUR children! Where were they and what was going on before they were dropped off? Where were the safety nets, the relatives, the neighbors, the church, the Boys and Girls clubs? In Nebraska they are scrambling to rewrite the law, but what about all of the children who are living without a net? Just because they don't get dropped off at a hospital doesn't mean they aren't without needs that aren't being met. We are the parents. We are the neighbors. We have to recognize we are living in a society where our children have become disposable. On the same day the last child was dropped off in Nebraska, from Iowa, a father shot and killed his wife, children and his mother in law in southern California, because he was suffering financially. A mother on the east coast stabbed her two daughters to death and then shot herself. We have come to the place as a society where we think it's better for a child to be dead or discarded than to see an oversized house repossessed or to lose the Mercedes and have to ride the bus. We are the parents!

This is the America we love? My apologies to Sony and Microsoft and MTV and Neiman Marcus, but we have to get back to basics and we have to make big sacrifices, each and every one of us. Turn off the TVs and the pcs and the iPhones and start looking at each other, talking to each other. Start holding hands instead of pointing fingers. Buy what you need, not everything you desire. Share what you have. Spend an hour a week helping someone else clean their house or feed their children, or repair their car. The American landscape today is not really different from London during the blitz, its' just the rubble is inside. We know things are breaking down and people are breaking down and we have the power to build it all back up. Our economy grows when we buy necessities enough for everyone even faster than it grows when we buy luxuries enough for a few.

It's time for us all to step up. We need to stop complaining, stop hating, stop yearning and start doing. We are the America we love.