"We Can't Make It Here "

"We Can't Make It Here "
James McMurtry

There's a Vietnam vet with a cardboard sign
Sittin' there by the left turn line
Flag on the wheelchair flappin' in the breeze
One leg missin' and both hands free
No one's paying much mind to him
The VA budget's just stretched so thin
And there's more comin' back from the mid-east war
We can't make it here anymore.

That big old building was a textile mill
It fed our kids and it paid our bills
But they turned us out and they closed the doors
We can't make it here anymore

See those pallets piled up on the loading dock
They're just going to sit there `til they rot
`Cause there's nothing to ship, nothing to pack
Just busted concrete and rusted tracks
Empty storefronts surround the square
A needle in the gutter and glass everywhere
You don't come down here unless you're looking to score
We can't make it here anymore

The bar's still open, but man it's slow
The tip jar's light and the register's low
The bartender don't have much to say
The regular crowd is gettin' thinner each day
Some have maxed out all their credit cards
Some are working two jobs and living in cars
Minimum wage don't pay for a roof, don't pay for a drink
If you've got to have proof
Just try it yourself Mr. CEO, see how far $5.15 an hour will go
Take a part time job at one of your stores
I bet you can't make it here anymore

There's a high school girl with a bourgeois dream
Just like the pictures in the magazines
She found on the floor of the laundromat
A woman with kids can forget all that
If she comes up pregnant, what'll she do
Forget the career, forget about school
Can she live on faith, live on hope
High on Jesus or hooked on dope
When it's way too late to just say no
You can't make it here anymore

Now I'm stocking shirts in the Wal-Mart store
Just like the ones we made before
`Cept this one came from Singapore
I guess we can't make it here anymore

Should I hate a people for the shade of their skin
Or the shape of their eyes or the shape I'm in
Should I hate `em for having our jobs today
No, I hate the men that sent the jobs away
I can see `em all now, they haunt my dreams
All lily-white and squeaky clean
They've never known want, they've never known need
Their shit don't stink and their kids won't bleed
Their kids won't bleed in their damn little war
And we can't make it here anymore

Will work for food
Will die for oil
Will kill for power and to us the spoils
The billionaires get to pay less tax
The working poor get to fall through the cracks
So let `em eat jellybeans, let `em eat cake
Let `em eat shit, whatever it takes
They can join the Air Force or join the Corps
They can't make it here anymore

And that's how it is, that's what we got
If the president wants to admit it or not
You can read it in the paper, read it on the wall
Hear it on the wind, if you're listenin' at all
Get out of that limo, look us in the eye
Call us on the cell phone and tell us all why
In Dayton, Ohio, or Portland, Maine
Or a cotton gin out on the great high plains
That's done closed down along with the school
And the hospital, and the swimming pool

Dust devils dance in the noonday heat
There's rats in the alley and trash in the street
Gang graffiti on a box car door
We can't make it here anymore

http://www.digitalvisionmedia.com/compadre/downloadmcmurtry.html

Daily Kos :: Losing My Religion: A Crisis of Political Faith

Losing My Religion: A Crisis of Political Faith
by stephdray

Fri Dec 3rd, 2004 at 19:38:47 CDT

Warning: Contents are an essay about personal-political pain. I apologize for myopia in advance. I promise, I will bury myself in work to try to get over it.

My Faith in the American Dream

My grandparents were immigrants.

They came from Italy with nothing. This country welcomed them at Ellis Island with the kind of open arms that would be unheard of today. Lady Liberty smiled down on them. America was still proud Lady Liberty was a gift from France--we liked being respected in the world.

Diaries :: stephdray's diary ::

Once here, my grandparents worked hard to achieve the American Dream.

Then the Great Depression came.

They were hungry, but proud. When my great uncle changed his last name from 'Marcanio' to 'Marc' so that he could find work, the family never spoke to him again.

They ate frogs, and squirrels, and dug up wild mushrooms to survive. My great grandmother had two miscarriages.

My grandfather's family suffered so much from cold that his brother tried to steal coal from a passing train. He was killed in the attempt.

The family never got over the shame of the stealing, or the death of the boy.

They did, however, survive the Great Depression because of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal.

The government employed them and helped them survive. And once they were on their feet again, they never forgot it. So deeply imbedded was the obligation, that both my grandfathers enlisted in the military during World War II, even though one of them had not yet become a naturalized citizen and was an only son. He was asked to go back to Italy, and fight Italians. He did so, without hesitation, because he believed himself to be an American; he believed in the righteousness of a government that took care of its people and fought fascism abroad.

After the war, they lived their American Dream.

My father was born and my grandfather named him after the brother who had been killed stealing coal. My grandfather knew that he had built an America in which his son would never have to steal coal.

In fact, my father went to college. Both of my parents did; they became professionals, and answered John F. Kennedy's call to national service too. And I was raised into their American dream, believing that it was possible for anyone.

You see, the New Deal was literally that--a new social contract between the people and the government, no less revolutionary than the Magna Carta. In essence, the New Deal was a promise that the government would take care of the people in exchange for the people giving back money and service to the government. This was a sacred promise--and the Greatest Generation believed in it. They paid into the system to support the elderly and the poor with the expectation that future generations would support them.

They built the infrastructure that made this country great. They built roads, they built power-plants, they put up telephone wires, they cleared forests, they planted forests, and they built cities and schools. They built the most prosperous economy in the history of mankind. There's not a dime that you or I have earned our whole lives long that was not built upon their blood, sweat, and tears--and if we kept our promise, there would not be a dime our children earned that they did not owe, in part, to us.

That was the New Deal.

One month ago today, my country rejected and broke this sacred promise."

Daily Kos :: This is what John Kerry did today:

I made top diary at Kos again. Weeeee!! :-)

Daily Kos :: This is what John Kerry did today::

Thu Dec 2nd, 2004 at 21:39:25 CDT



Bush hasn't made it to a single funeral of a soldier killed in HIS war

Former U.S. presidential candidate, Senator John Kerry (D-MA), lays flowers on the casket of U.S. Marine Lance Cpl. Dimitrios Gavriel during his military funeral at Arlington National Cemetery near Washington DC, December 2, 2004. Gavriel, from Haverhill, Massachusetts, died November 19 while fighting in Al Anbar Province in Iraq (news - web sites) and his funeral is the 99th 'Operation Iraqi Freedom' funeral at Arlington National Cemetery. REUTERS/Jason Reed

Diaries :: lawnorder's diary ::

From Common Ground Common Sense

PS: Thanks to all the links, poems, comments and pictures that made this post so much better than what I could ever dream. -- law

A special thanks to Armando and others who tried to keep the thread in the spirit it was intended
:-)"

Bush thinks he has a mandate ?

http://www.rense.com/1.mpicons/bushheil.htm
Must see - Flash plug-in needed

Daily Kos :: Kerry lost 369 votes at one Ohio polling place. Not an isolated problem: 115 lost at another

Old stuff: Precincts with the most 3rd party votes. There are other suspicious precincts.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/12/1/52932/8333

Source of the precinct level data:
http://boe.cuyahogacounty.us/boe/results/history/2004/E...

Graph showing how most of the precincts with high levels 3rd party votes had Kerry doing much better than Bush:
http://onfinite.com/libraries/205251/c8a.jpg

Daily Kos :: Kerry cost 369 votes at one Ohio polling place. Not an isolated problem: 115 lost at another

Daily Kos :: Boy scouts cost Pentagon school access

Boy scouts cost Pentagon school access
by kos
Tue Nov 30th, 2004 at 19:16:39 CDT

Legal blowback from the Boy Scout's homophobia.
Universities may bar military recruiters from their campuses without risking the loss of federal money, a federal appeals court ruled yesterday.

A three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, in Philadelphia, found that educational institutions have a First Amendment right to keep military recruiters off their campuses to protest the Defense Department policy of excluding gays from military service.

The 2-to-1 decision relied in large part on a decision in 2000 by the United States Supreme Court to allow the Boy Scouts to exclude gay scoutmasters. Just as the Scouts have a First Amendment right to bar gays, the appeals court said, law schools may prohibit groups that they consider discriminatory.
That, my friends, is called irony. Or karmic payback. Or something.

Daily Kos :: Boy scouts cost Pentagon school access

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