What It Means to Be a Democrat by George McGovern

Author:George McGovern
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group USA, Inc.
Published: 2011-10-20T16:00:00+00:00

PUTTING AMERICA BACK TO WORK

I got my first job at the age of fourteen, thanks to the natural tendency of grass to grow and the energy that comes with youth. One of our Mitchell, South Dakota, neighbors, Mrs. Truax, hired me to mow and edge her lawn and trim the front hedge. Mrs. Truax was a charming woman who demanded attention to detail. I must have met her standards, because by the end of the summer I got a 50 percent raise, leaping from ten to fifteen cents an hour. The next summer I developed a thriving business, commanding twenty-five cents an hour to weed gardens and cut grass for a dozen families around town. I don’t remember my parents ever giving me pocket money after I started high school.

My yard business taught me what the next seven decades of my life confirmed: there is no substitute for a good day’s work. A job puts food on a family’s table and shoes on their feet, pays mortgages and medical bills, and engages the mind and/or the body. It builds a sense of self-worth that is essential to one’s well-being. Even at my advanced age, I know I would be frustrated if I weren’t absorbed in various projects. Retirement for me has meant reducing my workdays from fourteen hours to twelve!

Contrast these pluses with the nearly 14 million jobless Americans (adding the two million more who are unemployed but have stopped applying for work), and one can begin to get a sense of the profound loss in earnings, opportunities, ego, and spirit that Americans have suffered since 2007, when the housing bubble burst and ushered in the Great Recession. These are difficult times.

No good Democrat wants our neighbors sitting at home, unable to earn an income by their own sweat or ingenuity. This is such a basic tenet that I would challenge anyone to disagree. The opportunity to make a living is the very foundation of America, no matter what political party one affiliates with.

But the stark fact, according to a report by the California Budget Project, is that there are four times as many people job hunting as there are positions to fill. The longer you’re unemployed, the less likely you are to get hired. It angers me that people eager to work are often treated no better than a carton of milk—as if they have a shelf life. Finding work is harder today because—besides our overall economic slowdown—millions of jobs have been shipped overseas, where labor is cheaper. It’s little wonder that in recent surveys a majority of Americans say they are feeling pessimistic about the future.

As a seven-year-old at the start of the Great Depression, I remember seeing the stricken faces of the bankers, store owners, and farmers who had lost their incomes and their property to bankruptcy and foreclosure. It was confusing to see grown-ups—who were in my mind all-powerful—unable to rescue themselves and their families. My father, a Wesleyan Methodist minister, was lucky: as long as God was in business, he stayed employed.

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