I come from the working class. My parents were factory workers with unions that offered a living wage, family health care, vacation pay and a pension that helped form a sustainable life. We lived in decent neighborhoods and had access to decent schools. We lived in a world where the sun shined.
But my people, those factory workers, the men who worked with their hands, the stay-at-home moms who helped run the schools and made the neighborhood safe, my people have been terminated by economic policies that crushed their unions and shipped their jobs out of the country. Today when I see the homeless I see my neighborhood. If my mom were young today, she would never have risen out of poverty, out of being one of 10 kids raised by a single mom, when her dad, my grandfather, left the family. My father, rather than working low-end jobs that paid a living wage, would have been chronically unemployed. Many of the neighborhood folk would today be one of those pathetic people who stand on street corners with a sign reading "Help put me out of my pain."
Today over 50 million Americans use food stamps. About 45 million have no health care. Officially 10 percent (realistically 17+ percent) of our work force is unemployed. Over two million Americans are in prison. Over five million Americans have already lost their homes and every day 10,000 more fall into foreclosure. And on and on it goes.
Today I am the pastor of a professional congregation in a solidly middle-class section of a prosperous global city. But even the architects and engineers and lawyers are beginning to feel the temperature rise. Even the suit-and-tie folks are stressed to the max and worried, deeply worried, about the future. And they should be, because they are the current target for termination by the enemies of our nation.
Of all the wars we are fighting -- whether in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen or increasingly throughout South America -- of all the impossible difficulties we have to overcome -- a bloated military, a media of propaganda, a politics of betrayal, an increasing police state -- of all these problems, the one most difficult yet most crucial to name and to strategize against, the most evil, cruel and relentless enemy facing the American people today, is the people we most lust after: the millionaires. It's the folks who live in the stratosphere and could care less about those of us living on the ground.
The real war is the class war and until we get that clear, we will never make any political progress. It's the class war, and the predatory, stratospheric millionaires are organized and winning ruthlessly. They want a return to the master-slave economy. Meanwhile we liberals keep hoping the Democrats will save us. But that ship is sunk. We need a more radical alternative.