By Paul H. Landes

In 1998, Tom Brokaw wrote the book “The Greatest Generation.” In it, he professed that those men and women fought World War II not for fame and recognition, but because it was the “right thing to do.”

That generation lived in the deprivation of the Great Depression, went on to fight in Europe and the Pacific and, when that war was over, they returned home and went back to what they all knew was the “right thing to do.”

I often find myself thinking about that generation, my parents’ generation, and wondering if we have lived up to their teachings and if we, ourselves, have done the right thing. Today has been one of those days. Many will take a strong objection to my reasoning — that’s the beauty of our political system — but I believe few will disagree with my conclusion.

When I was young, there was the March of Dimes, United Way, UNICEF, the American Red Cross, the American Cancer Institute and a few other internationally strong charitable organizations. Now, due to 30 years of Reaganomics, assisted by Clinton/Bush/Bush/Obama-globalism, along with the pseudo-libertarian Republicans, America has become the land of the poor and home of the beggar.

Due to sequestration, imprudent, lie-based and off-the-books wars, tax cuts for the 1 percent, offshore migration of jobs, corporate welfare and supply-side budgeting, the American federal government is broke. It has had to cut billions out of federal programs for the elderly, infirm, our youth, our poor, our out-of-hope.

The Republicans have, since Reagan, proclaimed that such charity is the province of the church and the people … not the government. And so … with their power and connection to the richest people on Earth, the Republicans have effected an amazing Morning in America.

As the sun’s rays rise over our land, they light up the cardboard sleepers in our cities, block-long lines leading to the doors of food pantries and temporary employment salons, parked-car homes on back roads and under overpasses, dormitories filled with families sleeping together on blanket-sized floor spaces, purloined shopping carts at the entrances to new Hoovervilles in urban parks and suburban forests.

On our computers, TVs and radios, we are inundated with pleas for “help” with medical bills, food, clothing and shelters, and we share these pleas among the millions of us online, always wishing we could do more. Meanwhile, members of the Republican caucus in Congress go on TV and tell us we shouldn’t help the homeless, foodless, hopeless, unemployed; that such help would create only laziness among them.

Members of Congress make a salary of $200,000 per year, perhaps another $100,000 to $500,000 a year from businesses they own or investments they have made, and they have a $2 million annual congressional expense account to pay for gas, bottled water, staff, car rentals, home rent and gifts for colleagues.

Republicans stand up with righteous anger at the bleeding-heart Democrats and independents who plead for an extension to unemployment insurance for the long-term unemployed. These people seek jobs that have been sent overseas or otherwise swallowed up by venture capitalists who have taken possession of factories and stripped them bare, stolen the pension funds, and sold the assets for scrap to be shipped to China to make the steel to be used for prison bars and barbed-wire fences in America to keep the radicalized poor under control.

This is not the country I grew up in. This is not the America we sang about and boasted of in our fifth-grade essays. This is not the America of my generation.

It is the America of my kids’ generation and they should be crying at yet another news story about the hopelessness of our land, the poor, the sick, the elderly, the unemployed, the poison, the radioactive Pacific, the droughts, the super-storms, the terrorist threats, the NSA’s disavowal of our founding documents, the hate-filled radio talk against African-Americans, women, Muslims, the poor, the weak, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free.

I’ve lived in the America built by the Greatest Generation. What now am I leaving behind for my children and their friends? What will life in America be like tomorrow?

I wipe away the tears hoping they will not return, yet knowing they will.

— Paul H. Landes is a novelist living in Davis.

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