Letter 2 America for January 7, 2014

Dear America,

As The Senate goes into the final stages of consideration of an extension of unemployment benefits for the long-term unemployed, the dubious arguments against it continue to be expounded: it makes people dependent; it encourages people not to look for work; the unemployed should go where the jobs are, like North Dakota in the oil fields for example.  But the speciousness of the arguments is reflective not just of conservative supply-side dogma.  As in the case of universal health care, this issue is not just a function of political bent.  We are engaged in a moral dialectic, not a political debate.  As I have opined many times before, I think we are engaged in defining American morality, and the fact that the divide seems to be along politically parallel lines is immaterial.

I saw a movie with my son over the weekend that, on its surface was just a Matt Damon action film that might be described as Mad Max meets Star Trek.  But Elysium, as the film was named, was more an allegory than an idle rumination on the future.  The story is about a worker on earth who is lethally dosed with radiation in a factory that is owned by a moneyed oligarch who lives on Elysium: a rotating satellite world where only the rich can afford to live.  The factory and the people who work in it live on an impoverished earth in what can only be described as an enormous slum, and Damon's character is an expendable worker who is sent into a small room to fix a problem foreshadowed with doom, which predictably claims him.  But there is hope...on Elysium.  On that orbital Garden of Eden there are machines that can cure any affliction, even traumatic injury, in seconds, but Damon's problem, and the gambit of the film, is getting there.  Elysium is forbidden to anyone not identified as entitled to be there--anyone who isn't rich.  The plot proceeds and is complicated by Damon's childhood romantic interest and her  infirm child, and after bloody fights between exo-skeleton wearing adversaries performing super-human feats of strength and carnal violence, the plot resolves with a climactic fight and the death of Damon's character, resulting in the salvation of all those who are sick on earth in consequence of his final, self-sacrificing, beatifying act.  That is why I think every conservative should see it.  As with every allegory, the plot is not the point.

We live in a world in which money not only talks, it speaks volumes.  It enhances the lives of a few but circumscribes the lives of several billions of us.  Elysium describes that great divide, albeit hyperbolically, and though a predictable plot is not fully off-set by spectacular special effects, it is a story worth watching in these times.  The nature of allegory is that it dramatizes the mundane, which on this planet, in this country at this time is four times as many jobless people as there are jobs available despite the claim that everyone can work if he wants to and will just go to North Dakota to take one of the oil-field-jobs vacated by the death of one of the 136 people who died there doing that kind of work this past year.  Those 136 deaths are another story.  But, the argument goes, if the poor would just help themselves, extended unemployment would disappear.  All they need to do is relocate across the country, risk their lives on work they have no experience with and live in dormitories so that they can send all they earn back to their families.  And they wouldn't need the Affordable Care Act either if they had the training necessary to get jobs with employers who provide health insurance.  To conservatives, poverty is a function of acts of will, not circumstance, and that would be accurate if we were willing to return to the days of the company store and debt as a means by which plutocrats controlled, and effectively owned the working poor.  But we have evolved past that point in the industrial revolution at which life for many people was just a form of indenture.  We have recognized that such arrangements are unjust and we forbid institutionalized servitude, but it exists in effect none-the-less, and that is the moral issue our politicians are sorting out for us today.

Should we demand of those who, for whatever reason, are unable to find gainful employment that they make profound sacrifices in order to find work that often times will not improve their lives or those of the ones they love, or should we help them to sustain themselves until jobs adequate to sustain them in the modicum of comfort that everyone recognizes as fair--a roof overhead, enough food to eat so that children don't go to bed hungry and access to medical care that could cure them if they just had the money to procure it--are available to them.  Half of Americans don't recall the mid-seventies, when the last recession of the kind of intractability that our last one demonstrated occurred.  Unemployment was rampant then too, but in 1973 congress passed, and President Richard Nixon signed, a law that trained workers in the course of government subsidized employment: CETA. It was something like the depression-era WPA program, so it was a model to which the United States had turned in prior hard times to good effect.  I knew people who were retrained through CETA, and the law changed their lives.  As to "Obamacare," I have also experienced the financial anguish of trying to keep a young family healthy when income is scarce, as nearly fifty million Americans had to do before the passage of the Affordable Care Act, and it is seldom a function of indolence to find one's self in such straits.  Like unemployment, lack of access to health care is a calamity that befalls some of us.  It is not a character flaw that can be remedied by an act of will to prosper.

So, now we stand atop both a political and a moral watershed.  We must decide on the right thing to do: subsidize the preparation of people for better lives by making sure they get the kind of training they need to work and they remain sufficiently healthy to do so, or relegate all of the unfortunate in our society to lives of despair in what must surely seem to them to be post-apocalyptic environs after the deepest recession we have experienced in four and a half decades.  With all of the capital sitting idle in the private sector--estimated to total $3 trillion--private industry could return to the days when businesses trained workers for themselves and people made careers working for a single company.  But business would rather rely on government in the form of community colleges, technical high schools and the like, decrying the cost of the role government plays in our lives, CEO's making 400 times the wage of a worker on the line all the while.  So it is up to government to provide in this area as private interests are no longer willing to be provident.  The question is, are our surrogates in Washington up to a moral decision that reflects our country's moral aspirations rather than its financial ones...and will we vote against them if they aren't.

Your friend,

Mike