To create a fair and flourishing country by Sherman Yellen

I was shocked but not surprised to see those Republicans who attended President Biden’s address on Wednesday sitting on their hands when he talked about lifting children out of poverty. What really blew me away though, was the sight of the two women sitting behind the president. Not a surprise either but a happy shock to my system.

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April 30, 2021

To create a fair and flourishing country
by Sherman Yellen, New York, New York

The negative GOP response to President Biden’s humanitarian address — one which can lift the lives of so many — t’was the expected response but disgusting. How can we continue to tolerate dire poverty in families, and hunger in children? Taxing the super-rich has been part of America’s policy for pre-Reagan generations — and it helped build the middle class.

The trajectory of poor immigrants who arrived at the turn of the century creating children and grandkids who became movers and shakers is gone. We have become as much a class-based society as England, Russia, and Germany were. Telling people to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps is nonsense if those people have no boots.

I live among some of the super-rich and as one who is not, I find them the worst of neighbors, the most privileged of people, visitors to their NYC building from homes in the Hamptons, Bermuda, and Palm Beach. Enough to turn this rather tame liberal into a liberal lion.

Years ago there was a saying that a man was liberal in youth and became conservative with age. Didn’t happen to this 89-year-old or to my surviving friends. When I was growing up in New York, City College was free or a pittance in tuition. The WPA supported the arts, and Roosevelt created a middle class out of the depths of a depression.

It seems to me that what Biden is attempting to do is not revolutionary, but going back into our history to create a fair and flourishing country.