Chatterbox: Box of rain

Around my house, there’s an expression that fits many moments.
I mentioned in my parenting column last week, parents are the be-all, fix-all, do-all resource in a family setting. As seemingly constant crises arise, most are things that even one helping hand could eliminate. In these moments I usually respond: “… and this is why the rich fight so hard.” After all, life is simplified when we have the help to alleviate the stress of even some of the minutiae.
Life for the middle class is a struggle often, if not almost always. For anyone without a regular and soluble income, for the poor or chronically sick, it’s a struggle every moment of every day. America hasn’t gone in the right direction in this vein. We’ve mentioned before that roughly 40% of our homeless are working full time, most working Americans are living paycheck to paycheck, and medical bills are the No. 1 cause of person bankruptcy. Such statistics are disgraceful for this “Land of Opportunity.”
We can’t blame COVID. It certainly didn’t help, but the epidemic is only recent. Many jobs were saved via technology. Some waned for a while, some rebounded to a greater degree than others, and, fortunately, we’re still on the upswing. Other jobs are gone forever, gone the way of the ice man and the telephone operator, gone to technology, but that is not news.
Chatterbox once talked about progress, the evolution of jobs, work availability, and the imperative need for people to adapt to the changes. However, too many jobs are disappearing today only due to the greed of the corporate regime, the calculated choking off of the middle class for the benefit of limitless corporate profit. Certain groups of Americans have always dealt with this, but we shouldn’t still be dealing with it, certainly not at this level, today.
“Downton Abbey,” a popular series on public television, gives us an amazing depiction of class distinction. It first aired in the U.S. in January of 2011. I tried it out along the way and found the class distinctions too uncomfortable to even watch, but as mentioned last week, we all evolve and I have been trying to watch it again. Sure, I love the clothes, but I’m looking at it in a more historical way now, and there are occasional pearls of wisdom.
In one episode, the father figure talks to a newbie about hiring and firing servants. He discusses the responsibility of property owners to employees. Through the honest work of skilled people, the wealth of the aristocracy must be shared, in part, with them.

Being reliable employers and contributing to a stable economy in America, is no longer what corporate America cares about. There seems to be no conscience, and no consciousness of still making great profits while also providing decent and soluble incomes for those who aren’t at the top of the ladder.
Employee benefits such as overtime pay and medical coverage have disappeared into the stratosphere of growing profits and platinum parachutes for executives. Cutting quality and putting the customer to work in a self-serve, no choice atmosphere, while raising prices and diminishing product are also tricks to buoy profits for those at the top. Forget about keeping the customers happy. These practices have become a huge problem not just for workers and consumers in America today, but are a dagger to the heart of what makes our nation strong on the world stage.
Raising a family has always been hard work but, along with all the usual hardships and responsibilities, young parents today must also endure this contrived tide of unfair employment practices. For the older parents, one of the hardest things today is to witness our adult children trying to successfully navigate these inequalities.
It’s tough to watch this generation – they who may be paying off college loans for decades – learn that: their investment in those hard-earned years of education have been rigged against them; or may not serve many of them as promised; and that the nation which sold them that gilded box of rain, with effort and investment far outweighing return, may not be honoring the contracts as advertised.
We watch our children who trusted, struggled, sacrificed and disciplined themselves to get where they were going, now struggle, even stagnate, in the place where they are … while the wealth continues to be absconded with, unconscionably, by the top tier corpor-crats.
Who will reel in this runaway train, and when, and how long can the nation endure this without a great fail?

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