The Ming Report

TOM JOAD, WHERE ARE YOU NOW?

April 4, 2006 - The President of the United States spoke with a Texas drawl and told us that it was the duty of the nation to confront the challenge of poverty in America with a bold initiative. No, the President was not Lyndon Johnson and the bold initiative of which he spoke was not the Great Society announced some 40 years ago. The backdrop for the speech was the St. Louis Cathedral in Jackson Square. Much of the city of New Orleans was still under water as the President spoke. The President who proclaimed our solemn duty to address poverty in America was not the Democrat who launched the War on Poverty. It was the Reformer with Results; the Compassionate Conservative; the erstwhile Governor of Texas the Republican George W. Bush.

Nine months have intervened since the President spoke of America’s duty. Nine months of inaction on the part of the Congress and the Executive Branch have been torn from the calendar and the Republican controlled Federal Government has been missing in action. The President’s rhetorical call for bold action has been forgotten and ignored. Since the President spoke those words summer has past in to fall; fall has descended into winter; and winter has passed into spring.

Trailers and RVs bought and paid for with our tax dollars boldly sit unoccupied and undistributed in a field in Arkansas. Debris still boldly litters the neighborhoods devastated and forgotten in the wake of last September’s storms. Hundreds of thousands of Americans displaced by the combination of nature’s assaults and their desperate poverty are still displaced across America, the restoration of their homes beyond their reach. They have become the Forgotten Americans, left behind when the President’s promise of bold action evaporated with his approval ratings.

There has been bold action to relieve those who need it least from the burden of providing for those who need the most. The President and Republican controlled Congress have boldly pressed to make permanent the advantages enjoyed by the President’s base – the Haves and Have Mores while America’s forgotten men, women, and children are left inexorably behind.

There has been bold action to feed the meat grinder of Iraq. The President and Republican controlled Congress have boldly pressed to make permanent the condition of arbitrary preemptive war designed to extend an American hegemony over the deserts of Iraq and plains of Afghanistan while America’s forgotten people struggle to find resources to rebuild their homes, their lives, and their hopes in a new edition of the Grapes of Wrath played out in Dallas and Huston; in Atlanta and Baton Rouge; in countless communities across America. Like the Okies they are refugees, migrants from their homes by acts of God and the inaction of their nation, resettled away from their familiar surroundings in modern Hoovervilles of crowded government paid rooms in cheap hotels.

Tom Joad, where are you now?