Imagine

IMAGINE a country where health care aides can't afford health insurance. Where food industry workers may depend on food banks to help feed their children. Where childcare teachers don't make enough to save for their own children's education.

IMAGINE a country where the economy is increasingly not working for working people.

IMAGINE a country where the minimum wage has become a poverty wage instead of an antipoverty wage. The minimum wage has lagged so far behind necessities that keeping a roof over head is a constant struggle and family health coverage costs more than the entire annual income of a full-time worker at minimum wage.

IMAGINE a country where childcare workers, mostly women, typically make about as much parking lot attendants and much less than animal trainers. Out of 801 occupations surveyed by the labor department, only 18 have lower median wages than childcare workers.

IMAGINE a country whose school system is rigged in favor of the already privileged, with lower caste children tracked by race and income into the most deficient and demoralizing schools and classrooms. Public schools budgets are heavily determined by private property taxes, allowing higher income districts to spend more than poorer ones. In the state with the largest gap, state and local spending per pupil in districts with the lowest child poverty rates was $2,280 greater in 2003 than districts with the highest child poverty rates. The difference amounts to about $912,000 for a typical elementary school of 400 students-money that could be used for needed teachers, books, computers, and other resources.

IMAGINE a country where the typical white household has about six times the net worth-including home equity-as the typical household of color.

IMAGINE a country that doesn't count you as unemployed just because you're unemployed. To be counted in the official unemployment rate you must be actively searching for work. The government doesn't count people as "unemployed" if they are so discouraged from long and fruitless job searches they have given up looking. It doesn't count as "unemployed" those who couldn't look for work in the past month because they have no childcare, for example. If you need a full-time job, but you're working part-time-whether 1 hour or 34 hours weekly- because that's all you can find, you're counted as employed.

IMAGINE a country where prison is a growth industry. The government spends more than $25,000 per year to keep someone in prison, while cutting cost-effective programs of education, employment, community development, and mental illness and addiction treatment to keep them out. (Insane huh?)

IMAGINE a country that imprisons black people at a rate much higher than South Africa did under the apartheid. One out of eight black men ages 25-29 are incarcerated in prisons or jails compared to one out of 59 white men in the same age group. The nation's bureau of justice statistics reports that incarceration rates for black men of all ages were five to seven times greater than those for white men in the same age groups. Incarceration rates for black women are generally four times higher than for white men.

IMAGINE a country where health care is managed for healthy profit. In many countries, health care is a right. But this nation has health care for some instead of health care for all. Nearly one out of five people under the age of 65 has no health insurance, public or private. Health care is literally a matter of life or death.

What country is this?
It's the United States.

Martin Luther King Jr states: "A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. We are called to play the Good Samaritan on life's roadside; but...one day the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be beaten and robbed as they make their journey through life...

A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth...There is nothing but a lack of social vision to prevent us from paying an adequate wage to every American citizen whether he be a hospital worker, laundry worker, maid or day laborer."


(adapted from "Imagine a Country-2006" by Holly Sklar)

God bless you ALL!