Squeezin’ the Juice
by SVEA SAUER

The party’s over folks. Forget about Mom staying home with the kids. Forget about a job that pays enough for one person to support a family. The jobs are all overseas where the stockholders are profiting from low wages.

The people most concerned, the low-wage worker here, feels helpless in the face of this reality.

Suggestions for job creation come from all sides but most are either temporary solutions – repairing bridges, building railroads – or they are dreams of future discoveries in science. In the meantime, we invent more electronic gimmicks and create more circuses and an occasional crust of bread.

This is not because of heartlessness. We are desperate to find a solution. Reality relentlessly bears down on us with its message of lost world leadership and preemption of power by others. The swift are winning the race.

This is the story on television.

What we fail to realize in our panic is the power of ideas. What brought us world power was an idea that still grips the world in awe. We created a government that freed people all over the world to hope that they too could rebel against second-class citizenship. And that is happening in China and India and even Iran. Our idea of freedom gave impetus to our imagination. We invented whatever we imagined. We believed in education for everyone so we created great schools that attracted people from all over the world, many of whom stayed here to add their skills to ours. Their example fired others to come and be Americans too.

I could go on and on about the idea that brought us prosperity and preeminence and I have not lost faith in it. Neither should you. It is not military conquest that kept us in power. “America” is a word that rings with poetry and lures others to follow.

If we stay together and pull together, that magic will continue to work. As others seize on equality and fairness, the world of workers will demand the same treatment our workers once knew before we sipped the drug of warfare. Low wages in far countries will no longer attract our factories. Sadly, this will not help those who suffer now. I sit by a window watching cold rain falling on a snowbound street and think of those who are homeless. I have been here before and I have been here also when the economy recovered.

The economy recovered because there is strength in ideas and our idea has not died. So long as we stay together in the spirit that created our prosperity we do not need to lose hope. Our great good fortune is to have lived to see it rise time and time again.

sveasauer@gmail.com