If we don’t eliminate it soon, it’s going to destroy us. There are so many places in our human budget where we can cut some of this wasteful callous indifference and begin to close that hole in our hearts:

• A study released Monday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that Georgia has the highest teen unemployment rate in the country.
• Decades of neglect have put the sea walls all along the South Shore near Boston at risk of crumbling, and one of these days the sea just might have its way with large numbers of people who live in its vicinity. Both the money to save these lives and the working hearts to care if they die or lose everything they own are lacking.
• College students are defaulting on loans at higher than usual rates because of the bad economy, rising tuitions, and cuts in federal aid, like Pell Grants. The article also notes that “federal budget cuts could take billions of dollars out of the federal Pell Grant program for low-income students as soon as next fall, forcing more students who previously have relied on grants to take out loans,” but who cares? It’s not happening to you, or you, or you. And you know who you all are.
• Discriminatory lending practices make economic suffering worse for black and Hispanic Americans. If you’re not black, hispanic, or economically struggling, you can move on. Nothing more to see here.
• The state of Virginia ranks at the bottom for licensing and regulation of child care providers. Some types of providers, like religious child care providers, are not even required to license their business. Obviously, this puts children at risk for abuse and neglect, but it’s only a problem for families in which both parents have to work to put food on the table, and/or do not have trusted family members to care for their children. Hardly worth spending the taxes to fund “licensing, inspections, background checks and training requirements.”
• Tens of thousands of Americans facing foreclosure and eviction from their homes are finding that the same banks and mortgage lenders that require them to have all their documentation just right when trying to adjust their loans, have themselves “lost” most or all of their documentation. In a desperate scramble to find documentation that never existed, lenders are hiring subcontractors to, literally, create false documentation, with fake signatures. There are untold numbers of foreclosed homeowners who lost their homes before this story broke. Can you imagine how it would feel to lose the home you love and then find out all or most of the documentation backing up the loan was nonexistent and had been forged after the fact? Of course, if you’re Paul Ryan or any of the Republicans who are gleefully slashing programs and funding without any concern for the human beings behind the numbers on the spreadsheet, you don’t have to care: It’s not YOUR problem.

Carry on, battered and besieged one percenters! You will win your noble struggle against the lower class hordes in the end!

Kathy Kattenburg

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