I read an article titled “The Hypocrisy of ‘Helping’ the Poor” in the New York Times back in October.
Most days, I like going through the opinion section of the New York Times. It’s interesting to hear viewpoints from all over the world while working at the opinion desk of a college newspaper in Bloomington.
On this particular day, Paul Theroux, the author of the article, argued that parts of America now resemble a third-world country.
This argument is an incredibly depressing and sobering one. Yet, we must keep a sense of optimism about our abilities to solve America’s problems.
According to Theroux, the third-world country claim is due to a combination of factors. The outsourcing of manufacturing jobs away from areas like the Deep South, for example, has left countless towns in disrepair. These places are met with abandoned factories, broken promises from politicians to bring back jobs and empty futures with nothing to look forward to.
Another reason, Theroux argues, is the constant desire for large businesses to find the cheapest labor possible to create and sell their products and services.
“Big companies have always sought cheaper labor, moving from North to South in the United States, looking for the hungriest, the most desperate, the least organized, the most exploitable,” Theroux writes. “It has been an American story.”
What’s more American, after all, than CEOs with millions using the work of many to fuel the productivity of their companies and our economy? And ship jobs overseas to make charts and numbers look attractive to their investors?
However, we cannot let despair cloud our thinking. We cannot sit around, point fingers and convince ourselves that there is nothing to be done about issues like poverty in America.
What we have to realize is that these issues are human-made ones. Leaders and people in authority created these problems to begin with. Aren’t we capable of finding people who can also create solutions to these problems?
We have to be optimistic that it can be done.
I’ll be the first person to admit there are a lot of things going on in our country and the world that make the future look grim, in addition to outsourcing, globalization and motives of a few wealthy CEOs.
We are still, seven years later, combating the effects of the Great Recession of 2008. The amount of underemployed Americans is still at about 12.6 percent, according to profitconfidential.com, meaning with these new outsourcing trends, they are getting fewer and fewer hours to support themselves and their families.
There is awful, raging terrorism happening in the Middle East. The rise of Islamic State group in Iraq, Syria and other countries continues to undermine the fighting the United States has done in the region over the past two decades.
The cost of higher education continues to skyrocket, putting increasing numbers of our nation’s best and brightest tethered to student loan debt after they graduate and begin to lead their working lives.
Things might be grim, but one of the good things about our country is that we are a moldable nation. We are a changeable nation. For as long as we’ve existed, we’ve been a nation of change: from the creation of the New Deal in the 1930s, to the civil rights protestors of the 1960s, we’ve had people argue America can and will be a better country than it was previously.
We have to believe that this argument is true, for our future’s sake, now.
ttfitzpa@indiana.edu
@tfitzwrites
