Third World America - Arianna Huffington [34]
Our county worker was able to get us a voucher to stay in a motel for a week while we looked for a place to live. That weekend, I went to a gas station to get something to drink. I asked the lady there for a job. She told me to come back tomorrow. I started working the cash register—two graveyard shifts a week and the other five days the swing shift. Thursday we found a one-bedroom in downtown Modesto. It was very small in a pretty bad area—the stove and heater didn’t work—but it was a roof over our heads.
In February our car broke down. I called the gas station owner to tell them that I would not be able to make it in time for my shift. When I got home, there was a message—he had hired his brother-in-law to take my place. I went back on unemployment.
Money is still tight. Our food stamps aren’t quite enough to buy food for the month. So in order to make sure there’s enough for our daughter, my wife and I usually don’t eat during the day. I’ve lost almost forty pounds.
I recently found out that I will receive my very last unemployment check at the end of this month. I applied for welfare when my unemployment was temporarily stopped, and it was not enough to cover the rent on even our small apartment.
I spend around thirty hours a week looking for work. But there just is not work available. I have offered to work off the clock and overtime. But no offers.
I used to consider myself middle class. I have some education and I have a wide variety of skills and experience, but almost every company I talk to says the same thing: Until the economy gets better, they are not hiring.
3
AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL DILAPIDATED
Even before there was a Constitution, our founding fathers were already thinking about building America’s infrastructure.
George Washington knew that without a national system of transportation, especially canals that would connect the East Coast to the Ohio and Mississippi river systems, we could never truly come together as a “more perfect union.”1
Thomas Jefferson put Washington’s vision into effect, creating a concrete national plan for roads and canals—a far-sighted plan that served as the touchstone for the next hundred years of development and led to America’s transcontinental railroad, championed by Abraham Lincoln.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt spent massive federal dollars, even in the midst of the Great Depression, to bring electricity to rural America. Dwight Eisenhower pushed through the interstate highway system.
Building things—amazing things, grand things, forward-looking things, useful things—has always been an integral part of who we are as a country. We created highways, waterways, railroads, and bridges to link us together and forge a strong nation.
We created an infrastructure—including electrical grids, dams, sewers, water pipes, schools, waste-treatment facilities, airports—second to none. It was the skeleton that held our country up, the veins and arteries that kept our economy pumping, our prosperity flowing, and our quality of life high. But those once-glorious systems are falling apart at an alarming rate—a casualty of lack of funding, old age, and neglect.
In 2009, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) released its comprehensive infrastructure report card. It’s not a pretty read. The nation’s overall infrastructure grade was an appalling D.2 The report noted a downward trend since 2005: transit and aviation fell from a D+ to a D, while roads dropped from a D to a nearly failing D–.3 Dams, hazardous waste, and schools maintained their lowly D grade, while drinking water and wastewater remained mired at D–.
“It’s the kind of report card you