The Invisible Side of "Freedom"

From my primary Substack "I Protest" donaldjeffries.substack.com (July 2022)

I think this article is especially timely, given that we are entering the holiday season. So many of these “Invisibles” ate Thanksgiving alone, and will have no one to celebrate Christmas with.

We all try to tidy up our home before visitors arrive. We vacuum; we don’t sweep the dirt under the rug. Everyone wants others to think their house is in order. We put our best faces on in public. No matter how much we protest, it’s human nature to want people to think the best of us.

Not all that long ago, if a woman gave birth to a child with Down Syndrome, or some other severe mental or physical disability, it was common to send them away to a home for “their kind.” My sister Janet faced this pressure when my niece Denise was born in 1968. They called her a “Mongoloid,” which was the clinical term at the time for those with Down Syndrome. Fortunately, my sister persevered and had the courage to raise her alongside her five other children. It was more common to vacuum them up, discard them. Keep your house in order. What will the neighbors say?

My work seems to attract people from what I call the invisible part of America. The system doesn’t work well for about eighty percent of us, but for the Invisibles it doesn’t work at all. People who, through no fault of their own, were born into wildly dysfunctional families. Often abusive parents, sibling estrangement, and receiving no emotional or financial support. Yes, some can rise above that, but most can’t. I hear from people regularly, who are floundering. Their sad stories reinforce my dark views on the present state of this country.

When human beings are struggling, they basically have two options. They can turn to family, who more often than not aren’t there in any meaningful sense. Or they can seek help from the social safety net we pay for, but is so complex and impenetrable that it might as well not be there either. My long experience with my brother, and to a lesser extent my niece, taught me just how difficult it is to get any of that assistance that might be there, but is dangled teasingly just out of reach. Matthew Lesko, the question mark guy, made a very nice living out of selling books that supposedly revealed all the government benefits that are otherwise inexplicably unknowable.

I know people who are homeless. Living in their car or a tent in the woods. I know too many who don’t even have a car. Try not having personal transportation in this Banana Republic. We offer very spotty bus service, and no real mass transit system. People I know who are making $15 an hour or less, and thus will never be able to buy any car that runs, have to Uber to work. Which eats up a large chunk of their daily pay. What is the solution for those people? Like well over 70 percent of Americans, they don’t even have $1000 in savings. Even before used cars skyrocketed in price under the Biden Reign of Terror, they couldn’t have afforded even a nonworking vehicle.

I know people who can’t buy insulin for their diabetes, because they don’t have any health insurance. And no, that isn’t because of Obamacare. I know others who might have a serious illness, but their woefully inadequate insurance doesn’t cover testing and possible treatment. No one should be financially ruined by the costs of our horrific Medical Industrial Complex, but many have been. In these cases, that stage isn’t even reached, because they literally can’t access healthcare services.

No one should be homeless in the wealthiest country in the world. The crisis of people living on the streets was front page news in the 1980s. Some Democratic Party politicians notably slept on heating grates to try and publicize the issue. In the ensuing forty years or so, absolutely no progress has been made in this area. In fact, we now have huge tent cities in California, and human beings defecating on the streets. And the government doesn’t even clean it up. There are many reasons for this explosion in homelessness, but regardless no one is doing anything about it.

I know a much younger guy who tried to kill himself about ten years ago. His parents and siblings never even came to see him when the hospital called them. So his entire family support system is there, but not functioning for him. And the social safety net is supposedly there, but almost impossible to navigate. Especially when one has to work at a low paying job to barely survive, which leaves no time to contact any part of this social safety net. If you work day shift, then those places are closed when you get off. Try making “personal calls” at one of these horrific dead-end jobs.

I know a woman in her sixties who works at Panera Bread. Despite having physical issues, she has to walk back and forth to work each day, crossing a busy highway in the process. For that kind of “new normal” job; low pay, few if any raises, few if any benefits, and little chance at promotion. It’s shameful that anyone working a job can’t accumulate enough money to buy even an old used car. I know lots of young, and even older people, working the same kind of blue-collar jobs I did in my twenties, who can only dream of having their own transportation. That wasn’t the case in my youth.

Jack London wrote The People of the Abyss over a century ago. The fact that it’s still relevant reading tells you all you need to know. The War on Poverty was obviously as big a failure as the War on Drugs. People call me a socialist when I harp on the unfair distribution of wealth, which has actually grown even worse since London’s day, and now impacts far more people. The great American middle class, built during the post-World War II era, has been decimated by massive immigration, globalist trade policies, corporate greed, and outsourcing.

I wrote a book touching on all this a few years back. Survival of the Richest: How the Corruption of the Marketplace and the Disparity of Wealth Created the Greatest Conspiracy of All exposes this rigged economic system. It shows how, as happens in casinos, 80 percent of the people must “lose” to varying degrees, in order for 20 percent to be “winners.” Obviously, the biggest winners of all are the top tier of the One Percent. They are utterly above our laughable legal system and are more entitled than any real or mythical welfare queen ever dreamed of being.

The same mainstream media that serves as mouthpieces for the corrupt state, portrays the America they enjoy, as entitled “winners” of crony capitalism. They may occasionally have a story about a Black family who’s struggling, but it’s placed in the meaningless context of “racism,” and attributed to “White Privilege,” not economic unfairness. You can be confident that no one on television, or in films, was ever one of the Invisibles. Sure, they may claim a Jim Carrey or somebody was homeless for a while as a youth, but as I documented in a chapter of the book that wasn’t included in the published version, but was published on my blog, virtually everyone who is famous for anything came from wealth, or at least solid upper middle-class backgrounds. You can read all three deleted chapters here: Survival of the Richest Bonus Chapters

No local “journalist,” let alone multi-million dollar talking head, ever lived in their car, or worse couldn’t afford a car to sleep in. The only good thing about Walmart is the fact they apparently let people sleep in their cars in their parking lots. No celebrity, or future CEO, wondered where their next meal was coming from as a kid. Or stayed sick because they had no health insurance. Celebrities, like our political “representatives,” cannot relate to any of the problems millions of Americans have to contend with daily, because they have never had to face them.

When I wrote Survival of the Richest, I found statistics showing that the bottom fifty percent- half of the people in this country- have virtually nothing. Collectively, they possess less than one percent of the overall wealth. Since the book was published, the situation has only grown worse. With just the untold millions of illegals that have entered our open southern border the past few years, the number of desperately poor people in America has grown dramatically. Every one of those immigrants took their place at the very bottom rung of our rigged economic system.

I will always be drawn to the Invisibles. There hasn’t really been a champion for the poor since Robert F. Kennedy. The Kennedys were the only politicians to ever visit Appalachia, where the poorest of the poor can be found. The Invisibles are the figurative dirt we get rid of before we entertain company. No one who is a “winner” in this casino economy wants to be reminded of the “losers,” unless they feel like ridiculing them. Certainly, as a whole, we don’t want to advertise the fact that more than half the country is “failing” under this system of “freedom” we insist on forcing upon so many smaller countries.

We have no idea of just how much the unconstitutional lockdown, with millions of workers losing their jobs, really impacted the situation I covered in the book. It’s a certainty that it didn’t improve things. Who knows? After the past few years of Orwellian authoritarianism, the percentage of Americans with less than one percent of the collective wealth might be up to 60, or even 75 percent. We don’t know how many illegals, poorer than anyone already here, have been added to the mix. And we don’t even know the real unemployment rate, because it’s been dishonestly calculated since the 1990s to make things look better.

If the Democrats were still the party of the “little guy,” they’d be up in arms over increased homelessness, lack of transportation for the working poor and even lower middle-class, and lack of healthcare for those who can’t afford our disgraceful Medical Industrial Complex. Instead, they work diligently to “cancel” people who say the “wrong” words, or have the “wrong” opinions. They just assess every wrong in society as being “racist.” And they pay a lot of attention to “climate change,” whatever that is. But not to the BP oil spill, the worst ecological disaster in modern history.

The “huddled masses yearning to breathe free” would have to pay for that oxygen, if our criminal leaders could figure out a way to do it. As I’ve noted many times, those in charge of this mess are, and have been for over a century, eugenicists. They want less people. A lot less people. The Invisibles are not “fit,” let alone the “fittest,” and thus are disposable under their religion of evolution. Perhaps that is what’s really going on now, with the death rate rising so alarmingly last year. The culling of the herd they have long fantasized about.

But this culling doesn’t appear to be targeting the Invisibles exclusively. A bunch of celebrities have died mysteriously, usually without a cause even being publicly reported. Maybe they understand that they need some Invisibles, to do the grunt work they won’t. Ideally, they’d like to have a true slave force, which makes their obsession with our history of slavery all the more laughable. After all, if it’s slavery itself they object to, they’d be pretty upset about the estimated forty million slaves that exist around the world today. But no one mentions that.

My hero Huey Long was the first, and only, elected politician to make this his foundational issue. When they assassinated him, his “Share our Wealth” societies had already attracted some twelve million members. Huey spoke for the Invisibles. He’d be heartbroken over the tent cities, public defecation, and lack of family and societal support for the most vulnerable people today. Mahatma Gandhi said that “The true measure of any society can be found in how it treats its most vulnerable members.” Present day America doesn’t treat its most vulnerable members very well.

The lack of empathy and compassion on the part of our corrupt officials, except for perhaps “transgenders” and illegal immigrants, is reflected in the population at large. When that Black Friday crowd at a Target some years ago totally ignored a man who had collapsed on the floor, with no one even calling 9/11, it revealed how completely we had crossed another of those moral lines in the sand. This wasn’t a woman being raped, or an elderly person being assaulted, where someone intervening might possibly face danger. There was no risk involved, and yet no one showed the least bit of compassion. No one paid attention to him at all. He was an Invisible.

I’ve always rooted for the underdog. Always been attracted to those “losers” in this rigged system. The underdog has never been more unpopular than today, again unless you include “transgenders,” who have a completely different set of issues and are hardly invisible now, and illegal immigrants, who are given free healthcare and a few other perks, that keep them able to provide that essential cheap labor. I’ve been counseled many times, by people who don’t understand why I gravitate to those they don’t even notice. Because they’re invisible.

Out there, in the tent cities, and in rusty cars in Walmart parking lots, are people who could have been engineers, or real journalists, or business leaders. Cursed by being born into a set of circumstances they had no control over. We can’t measure what damage an abusive parent, or chronic alcoholism, does to a child. Parental neglect is as real as adult children’s ingratitude. American family dysfunction, which I talk about frequently, is just as responsible for the plight of the Invisibles, as is our gargantuan, worthless bureaucracy.

But above all, it’s a simple matter of finances that creates most Invisibles. If you’re born into great wealth, even if you have neglectful parents (which happens pretty often in upper class households), you should still have the resources to avoid homelessness, or an untreated illness. You almost certainly will have reliable transportation. No one lucky enough to be born on third base, and think they hit a home run, to use Gerald Celente’s expression, seems to recognize how fortunate they have been. As we used to say, there but for the grace of God go I.

Eugene Debs, at the time he was thrown into prison by Woodrow Wilson for protesting U.S. involvement in World War I, declared, “I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars, while millions of men and women who work all the days of their lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence.” I would add that, even if someone wealthy does something really useful, they aren’t worth millions of times more than a physical laborer. No life is worth that much more than any other. We used to recognize that, and the wealth was distributed more fairly.

But even if average workers, who are living paycheck to paycheck with little to no savings, could suddenly be paid adequately, that still wouldn’t bring the Invisibles into the light. The other part of the equation- family dysfunction and lack of support- can’t be addressed by legislation. You can’t order family members to care about one another. You can’t mandate that parents or siblings provide shelter for their struggling loved one. Or can you? After all, our society mandated a whole lot of things they had no right to during the unconstitutional shutdown.

I wanted to write something like this, to demonstrate where my heart still lies. I will never be a conservative. If I have a dollar in my wallet, I try to give it to the person looking for contributions at traffic lights. I usually don’t carry cash for any other reason. Yes, I know they might be schemers, but they’re still standing outside and humbling themselves. Especially if it’s very cold, or raining, then I assume no charlatan would be exposing themselves unless they were truly desperate.

Just because I despise identity politics, and refuse to engage in self-hatred or feel guilty about being White, or want illegal immigrants deported, doesn’t mean that I stopped being a liberal. But I mean classical liberal. Someone with one of those denigrated bleeding hearts. Who feels empathy for anyone living in poverty, or struggling without love and guidance. I gravitated to Charles Dickens’ books for a reason. “Liberal” used to mean open-minded and tolerant. And someone who seeks to reform and improve things, and right injustice. I think I fit that definition.

Huey Long’s great 1934 barbecue speech deserves to be quoted extensively here. I think it captures his spirit, and explains why I fell in love with him as a youngster. “How many men ever went to a barbecue and would let one man take off the table what's intended for 9/10ths of the people to eat? The only way you'll ever be able to feed the balance of the people is to make that man come back and bring back some of that grub he ain't got no business with,” Long stated.

“Now, how you going to feed the balance of the people? What's Morgan and Baruch and Rockefeller and Mellon going to do with all of that grub? They can't eat it. They can't wear the clothes. They can't live in the houses. Give 'em a yacht! Give 'em a palace! Send them to Reno and get them a new wife when they want it, if that's what they want,” the Louisiana populist continued. “But when they've got everything on the God's loving earth that they can eat and they can wear and they can live in, and all that their children can live in and wear and eat, and all their children's children can use, then we got to call Mr. Morgan and Mr. Mellon and Mr. Rockefeller back and say, "Come back here. Put that stuff back on this table here that you took away from here -- that you don't need. Leave something else for the American people to consume."

Something is seriously wrong with a system that allows for an extra castle, or a private island for the most fortunate, but not enough for shelter for the least fortunate. If that makes me a communist, then so be it. I believe in free enterprise, and an honest marketplace. But our crony capitalist system isn’t honest, and prevents competition. My book demonstrated that we have a marketplace that doesn’t always reward hard work or extraordinary skill, and often lavishes blessings on waste and incompetence. Failed CEOs get $40 million golden umbrellas, but laid off workers with decades at the company, replaced by cheaper labor, don’t even get a severance package.

I’m a populist. Populism is defined as “a political approach that strives to appeal to ordinary people who feel that their concerns are disregarded by established elite groups.” Ordinary people are disregarded, and mistreated, by the elites who control the corrupt system. Perhaps the best thing Donald Trump ever said was, “It’s a rigged system, and you don’t trust those who rigged it to fix it.” Now, of course, he benefited greatly from that rigged system. But the point is sound. No even halfway steady middle class person has a position of power in this country, let alone any Invisible. Those who rigged it aren’t going to fix it.

Call them what you will. The underclass. The forgotten. The needy. The cruel will label them derelicts. To paraphrase JFK, they breathe the same air we do. They desperately need another champion, another Huey Long, to advocate for them collectively, just as each of those Invisibles needs someone who loves them to advocate for them individually. I advocated for my brother, and my niece, and a few other people who needed someone. That’s the best one person can do. But together, as RFK noted, we can send forth millions of tiny ripples of hope. As JFK said, “If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.”