America's "Descamisados"

We count on you to provide us with material for this blog. I can expound endlessly on the economy as I did a few days ago ... or turn pessimistic as I do below, but that isn't what this blog should be. It should be poems and stories by Sid Bolotin (a poem of his follows) and Harvey Sage, and stuff by a lot more of you who know how to write. Up at the top, we tell you where to send your poetry, short stories and essays. Please join us. And here is that poem by Sid, and it is a beauty.

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A Moment in Time
Sid Bolotin

Who is the child captured in the seventy-six-year-old picture
The one so engrossed in his one-year-old birthday cake
And what to make of the nine relatives surrounding him
His parents, grandfather, uncle, aunts, cousins
Oblivious to what is to occur ten months later
Unknowing of what is to befall them
All stare into the camera, the silent witness
To this celebration, this moment in time
To become known as “the time before”
In the stories told and retold to the child
By the twenty-four-year-old widow to be

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Los Descamisados

People without steady employment have difficulty paying for housing, be it rental accommodations or a mortgaged home, subject to foreclosure. They also have difficulty putting food on the table for their families. Unemployment benefits are a temporary help, but they are rarely enough to cover more than the basic necessities. When a search for a way of earning a living repeatedly hits a brick wall, public assistance (welfare) can be turned to, recognizing the sad fact that for the unemployed, once whatever savings they have are exhausted, poverty becomes a permanent way of life. Many Americans today lay awake at night thinking about nightmares such as this.

Here in beautiful South Florida in a county which advertises that it has “The Best of Everything,” almost 12% of families have incomes below the poverty level, more than 45,000 homes are in foreclosure and the unemployment rate exceeds 12%. The people are hurting. We close our eyes to much of this and watch American Idol or whatever NFL game is on TV. But the people are still hurting out there.

They were beginning to feel the pain back in 2008 when they elected Barack Obama to be our 44^th President. But that didn’t stop the pain from growing worse. We have no guarantees that the new Republican majority in the House of Representatives will do anything to stop America from hurting either.

History teaches us that when situations like this exist, the people become restless and uneasy. They begin to wonder if they can do anything to allay their feeling of helplessness. In today’s world, Hamlet’s thought of taking “arms against a sea of troubles” is impracticable for them, even with our Constitution’s Second Amendment behind them. People in such circumstances will take rash actions, including following leaders who offer solutions, often radical ones, to their problems. This is the story behind the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution. Without a “hurting” populace, neither would have succeeded. Robespierre and Lenin both offered solutions which included overthrowing and killing those in power. Despots in power today in Cuba and Venezuela got to where they are because the poverty-stricken people in those countries had nowhere else to turn. It was the same story in Argentina where Evita Peron gained the support of the “descamisados” (the shirtless ones) to put her husband, Juan, in power.

Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats have a true rapport with America’s increasingly large number of “descamisados.” Bill Clinton often said “I feel your pain,” but I doubt that he really did. The greatest danger in America today is that someone will come to power because of the people out there who are “hurting” and will turn to anyone to relieve their pain. The Germans did this in 1932, and didn’t know what they were buying into until it was too late.

JL