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Posted on 09/02/2004 12:55:59 AM PDT by kattracks
BY THE TIME my mother, sister and I joined my father in America in 1976, he had saved $6,000 after two years of working as a violinist in the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. His salary was $11,000 (that’s $36,000 in today’s dollars). The former Soviet dissident considered himself lucky. The $6,000 ($19,600 today) was enough for a down payment on a house in the suburbs, and his salary managed to support a family of four.
We had a car — a 1966 Plymouth my dad bought for $60. When Mom started working as a computer programmer at $9,000, our cup was running over.
For my husband’s family, the year they arrived was 1980, the family car was $200, and his mother and father — working as engineers for $5 and $10 an hour, respectively — were able to put a down payment on a house within five years. They had help. The state of Maryland and the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society initially provided housing, utilities, food and health care — the same things that today’s working poor get. But the family, who had come to America in March, were off the dole by Oct. 24 (my mother-in-law proudly recalls the date).
I do not recognize the country that John Edwards and other speakers at the Democratic National Convention describe, the one where people are working full time, yet are unable to make ends meet, where working families are drowning under the weight of a poverty subsistence, bank-breaking health care costs and no safety nets.
The Soviet emigres of the ‘70s and early ‘80s were a motivated bunch. For American-born welfare beneficiaries, on the other hand, it wasn’t until the system itself became the motivator in 1996 that they were weaned off. That year, the Welfare Reform Act, which had been passed by a Republican-controlled Congress, changed welfare from a lifestyle to a temporary solution — just as we immigrants had used it (at least the honest ones among us). It stipulated a two-year deadline for finding a job, at which point the help would become more specific (child care, housing, vocational training, work transportation — including money to fix the car if that was the only way to get to work). No one would be left out in the cold. Dick Morris dragged a kicking and screaming President Clinton into signing the bill — if he wanted to get re-elected. So what are today’s Democrats thinking?
Edwards painted an idyllic picture of growing up as the son of a mill laborer. He credited his mother’s part-time furniture refinishing with putting him through college, then declared that every American, no matter who they are, where they live or what their color, should have the same opportunity he did. The crowd roared. Yet the “opportunity” he described qualifies precisely as the poverty that he — and the rest of the speakers — spent the whole convention railing against.
The difference between Edwards’ experience and the one he laments on behalf of the working poor was summed up by President Reagan in 1986: “We were poor when I was young, but the difference then was that the government didn’t come around telling you you were poor.”
John Edwards’ parents were poor. But the government didn’t come around telling them so. That blissful ignorance helped keep their spirits buoyant, their incentive to succeed intact and the family afloat. But today their wealthy son and his party want to rob those in comparable situations of what Edwards had: the American will to persevere, which, when it falters, is buttressed by a safety net that includes free or subsidized health care for today’s so-called working poor, as well as food stamps, transportation, child care, job training and housing — those things that Soviet immigrants, empty-handed and new to a country, washed our hands of at first chance. Had we thought we couldn’t get by without it, we would have stayed in the Soviet Union.
Somehow we managed, we found a way — because we had to. We survived, because America gave us hope — and not the kind that John Edwards promises is “on the way.” His idea of hope is what we left behind in the Soviet Union.
For my family, it’s been a long struggle and a hard-earned success. Kerry/Edwards, please don’t take us back to Russia.
Julia Gorin is a contributing editor to www.JewishWorldReview.com and FoxNews.com
John Edwards will help the poor sue their way to prosperity...
Just look around. It's called, "spending more than you earn." It has been growing since consumer self-serving people have open lines of credit thrown at them. The "rich" folks with that HUGE house for two, two NEW cars, gym membership, etc. seem to complain that the bills are getting heavy...they are fighting, tired, always have someone else to blame. They are financially poor, but worse they are spiritually poor.
Edwards painted an idyllic picture of growing up as the son of a mill laborer.
Yet another writer that hasn't done the relatively easy research that John "Wha-ambulance" Edwards' father was the Plant Manager of the mill, not a productive employee.
Question....where is MRS. EDWARDS??? Could she be the fat lady who will sing when it's over?
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