“Am I my brother’s keeper?”

- Genesis 4:9

Apparently, our national leaders have decided the United States of America is no longer a nation in which we are our brother’s keeper.  As evidence, one has only to look at the assault the Republicans in Congress are making on so-called “entitlement” programs.”  Or consider their burgeoning opposition to the EPA’s attempts to curb air pollution.  Or, how about their attempts to repeal the healthcare and financial reforms enacted by the previous Congress?  Yet, all the while, they maintain their insistence on lower taxes for the wealthiest Americans while they provide no relief for those in the middle class or those below the poverty level.

At the state level, look at the current attempt by the governor of Wisconsin to strip public unions of their collective bargaining rights—this because he needs to make up a budget deficit that only came about because of $140 million in special interest spending he approved during his first six weeks in office in order to help repay those who had contributed to his campaign.  But Wisconsin is not alone because similar situations are on the verge of breaking out in several other states.

Or look at Kentucky governor, Steve Beshear, who has allied himself with the Kentucky Coal Association in a suit against the Environmental Protection Agency to block more stringent regulations of mountaintop removal—a practice that, since it was first used in 1970, has destroyed some 500 mountains and poisoned at least 1,200 miles of rivers in the poverty-ridden Appalachia area of Eastern Kentucky.

Mothers in this region are forced to bathe their children in water with arsenic levels as high as 130 times what the EPA deems safe to drink.  Roads in the region are routinely destroyed by overloaded trucks.  The air is clouded with pollutants.  Children attend schools that sit below ponds holding billions of gallons of sludge, and go home at night only to lose sleep worrying the sludge dams will break, releasing the sludge down upon them.  It happened 40 years ago in Buffalo Creek, West Virginia, killing 125 people; it could happen again today.

In the face of the high unemployment that has now staggered this country for nigh on two years, look at a recent report by the National Employment Law Project that says a trend is growing among employers to not even consider the applications of the unemployed for jobs that become available.  Among examples offered by the project were a phone manufacturer that posted a job announcement with the message: “No Unemployed Candidate Will Be Considered At All,” and a Texas electronics company that announced online that it would “not consider/review anyone NOT currently employed regardless of the reason.”

For centuries, we Americans have been nothing if not optimistic.  But now there is a terrible sense that so much that we took for granted during the past six or seven decades is being dismantled or destroyed.  This is the environment that is giving rise to the worker protests in Wisconsin, Ohio and elsewhere.

But the ferment is not just about public employees and their unions.  Researchers at Rutgers University found last year that more than 70 percent of respondents to a national survey had either lost a job, or had a relative or close friend who had lost a job.  Yet two years into the Obama administration and we still see not the slightest glint of a jobs program to put people back to work.  And with the current situation in the Congress, it is doubtful we will see one within the next two years.

That is beyond ominous; it is epidemic.  And it is shameful!  The great promise of the United States and its primary offering to its citizens and the world—the hope of a better life—is at grave risk.

A 69-year-old woman from northeastern Vermont recently wrote her Senator:

“We are the first generation to leave our kids worse off than we were.  How did this happen?  Why is there such a wide distance between the rich and the middle class and the poor?  What happened to the middle class?  We did not buy boats or fancy cars or diamonds.  Why was it possible to change the economy from one that was based on what we made and grew and serviced to a paper economy that disappeared?”

Those of us not part of the wealthy class, especially those who have lost jobs and homes, are often overwhelmed with a pervasive sense of loss.  This is not the America in which we grew up believing; and when Hope is gone, self-respect is surely soon to follow.

Perhaps we should consider changing the plaque on the Statue of Liberty from

“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

to

“Abandon hope all ye who enter here.”