Watching C-SPAN with tears in my eyes

While news and condolences were streaming into my local NY-1 channel over the loss of the political giant Nelson Mandela last Thursday evening, they reviewed his life as a boxer, young lawyer, and activist, the man who ‘singlehandedly’ roused his people to take down the South African Apartheid state after he had been imprisoned for nearly 28 years. Yet, despite his glorious life, I felt a shock of grief at his death.

There are not too many individuals of any color like this in the 21^st century, especially with the heart to forgive their previous enemies and pursue hope and freedom to unify a nation. Both black and white politicians lauded Mandela’s bravery and ability to focus on the good in all people, and how gracefully he walked from prison to being president of his country.

Returning to NY-1, the video loop of the station’s Mandela news had gone round several times and I knew the newscasters’ lines before they and the politicians being interviewed spoke them. By accident my finger slipped on the remote buttons and I landed on C-SPAN, which was broadcasting a House hearing on the imminent stoppage of emergency unemployment benefits for America’s unemployed, now at an all-time high. Democrats Nancy Pelosi and Senator Carl Levin were leading the discussion. They were at the point where various unemployed people were giving personal testimony about what it felt like to be facing the loss of their last income stream, after losing their jobs.

This testimony, in tandem with the Mandela passing, literally brought tears to my eyes, despite being a hard-boiled New Yorker. Mandela had New York qualities. He was incredibly strong and flexible and not frightened by a good fight. In sharp contrast, these unemployed people were frightened of the imminent loss of their unemployment checks, fearing they would lose their homes, money for food, and their sense of dignity in the community. They might need to take even more pay cuts for hourly jobs at still lower rates. All this was after having their food stamps cut.

These were people who could be your neighbors, friends or relations. One woman from Massachusetts was highly educated, a long-employed microbiologist for drug companies and in academia; another woman, from Virginia, who after teetering on the edge of losing her home had found a job the day before attending the hearing. This ended a frighteningly long job search. Previously, she had worked in hospices caring for the elderly for two decades and then worked in management in public relations and advertising. She had gotten to the point of buying space on a billboard with her picture on it saying, “Hire Me.” Fortunately, that was when her new job came, and she cancelled the billboard ad.

Both women spoke of the fear and anxiety of facing another day without an income stream. It brought sleepless nights and endless anxieties, along with piles of resumes to be mailed or filed online on job boards. The woman who had just gotten a job pointed out her resume submissions stacked up two feet. She also mentioned that one of the first questions the forms asked was the year you had graduated college; this was a backdoor way of obtaining your age, and not be sued for age discrimination.

Next was a man who described himself as 67 years young and who had worked for forty years in construction. He took pride in saying for all those years he had wakened for work at 4 a.m. He dedicated himself to looking for work in the same way. During his working years, he had taken pride in his work in construction. He was proud of the quality work he had done. It had given him a sense of accomplishment and purpose. Choked up, he said that this is what had kept him going in life, along with a paycheck. But now winter was coming, a tough time in construction, and he was sharing an apartment with a friend. Bills were coming in. Tears welled in his eyes, as they did with the two women and many others, young and older, there to testify, who nodded their heads in sympathy, including members of the panel in the congressional chamber.

These were people not used to taking without giving, not welfare queens, but proud of the work they did and not used to being totally marginalized by their own country, abandoned by a bunch of heedless political hacks. That’s why they were here, along with many others, younger and older, who didn’t speak, but showed their faces to the Republicans. They were the stuff America was made of; not pariahs, not slackers, but grown-ups ready to give back to the country for previous opportunities given to them.

Their chagrin was aggravated by the fact that corporations have been turning in banner profits this year, yet the U.S. workforce was about to be starved out of the system by workers in countries thousands of miles away. Plus the wages of CEOs was hundreds of times larger than those of these working people. The speakers on both sides of the long table claimed they were ashamed of their country for letting conditions get to this point. The strong, grey-haired construction worker had trouble just speaking about it.

He said he had witnessed other people of his age lose their jobs, lose their self-esteem, lose their families, and eventually lose themselves. The words were well chosen. A priest from Catholic Charities spoke of the difficulties the agency was having maintaining their present commitments, let alone taking on more. He did say it was in the spirit of the season to be generous. He added that the Republicans, for once, should open their hearts and renew the emergency unemployment benefits immediately.

The Democrats on the panel lauded the people for coming and being so forthcoming, apologizing that these good people had to defend their existence to the recalcitrant Republicans, most of whom were probably born with silver spoons in their mouths, and had no idea what it felt like to be jobless. The only thing these folks wanted was a job, and not to lose this last income stream. Would that Obama, who praised Mandela could look John Boehner and Company in the eye. Would that he could say, “How can you do this to your countrymen? How can you be so cruel to your fellow Americans? How can you shame us all?”

Indeed they did. I noticed tears were rolling down my face. In my three-quarters of a century on the planet, I hadn’t seen anything like this. My father used to tell me about the Great Depression, but here it was again and called the Great Recession. What was the difference as 2% of the population lived like kings, and the 98% were driven deeper into poverty, starvation and humiliation?

How had we come so low? How did the haves cruelly create have-nots day after day, quarter after quarter of our financial periods? Who was guiding this Titanic America into a hidden iceberg, only to prove the unsinkable economy was not able to survive the hit. But when would the crowd dancing on the decks get that? When would they recognize themselves in these poor heroic souls, having to beg for those emergency unemployment checks, which would in fact add to the GDP, not make a dent downwards in it.

How could these heartless Tea Party fools pursue another sequester? What would Mandela think of them, the Great Man who had once walked among their numbers in 1990 when he first visited America at 70 years of age? The footage of him walking through Congress showed him as a happy hero. What would Nelson think of us now? What does the world think of us, seeing this on C-SPAN, or headlined in the news?

And seeing it all as easements still flowed from the Fed to the world reserve banks, and officials decided in Detroit whose pension and how much of it must be cut first to pay the bills in the scuttled Motor City. Think of it. Who do we throw into the lifeboats and who into a sea of predators? Bit by bit, the millions of American workers, once the standard of world labor, swallowed this bitter pill and were swallowed by it. How did we arrive at this awful betrayal of our people?

Thinking of all this, my tears turned to anger. My heart hardened against the Tea Party thugs. Maybe it’s time to read Mao’s little Red Book one more time, I thought. Maybe it’s time to turn Washington on its head, to mute the surveillance state, to paralyze the war-making and free up money for our own people to live on. Maybe it’s time to pull back from supporting 800 bases around the world and a quarter of a million of military personnel, who themselves are struggling to make ends meet, suffering not from enemy wounds, but wounds inflicted by their nation’s financial abuses.

I think, will this insanity ever stop? Would that some new Nelson Mandela appear from the wilderness after we lost him—as we lost MLK, JFK, RFK, and FDR, who all set America to have it stumble again. This slaughter of the lambs by the Apartheid State of the Rich, so willing to steal and claim our wealth must be toppled. Perhaps we should take a lesson from the activist Mandela, accused of being a terrorist early on. Let’s take a lesson from his playbook, and in self-preservation, put Washington on its deaf ear.

Jerry Mazza is a freelance writer and life-long resident of New York City. An EBook version of his book of poems “State Of Shock,” on 9/11 and its after effects is now available at Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com. He has also written hundreds of articles on politics and government as Associate Editor of Intrepid Report (formerly Online Journal). Reach him at gvmaz@verizon.net.