Gridlock on grand plans

My plan was to watch President Obama’s speech on job creation with a bunch of unemployed people at a recreation center in Inglewood.

But the center’s television didn’t work; all we could get were fuzzy images of designer-like purses on the Home Shopping Network. Somebody ran home to get a DVD player, as if that might remedy the situation.

Only one person had shown up anyway for the “watching party” sponsored by GoodJobs L.A., a local union-backed campaign to push politicians for job creation. And Frank R. Wilson isn’t even unemployed; he was there because he thinks it’s important to “make some noise” about the suffering he sees.

A retired electronics technician, Wilson, 83, watched the scene incredulously as tech-deficient volunteers studied the DVD player and the television, trying to figure out where to plug which red, white and yellow prongs to get the commander-in-chief to appear on the screen.

“I could have watched this at home,” Wilson complained, shaking his head and checking his watch. “You don’t have no cable or no antenna, you can’t make no connection.”

He kept repeating that, as he paced the room. “No cable, no antenna. It’s hopeless.” The television needs some link to an outside source, beyond electricity, he explained, to capture what was going on at that moment in Washington, D.C.

“No cable, no antenna, no hope.” Wilson said it often enough, that it began to sound to me like some kind of metaphor.

Like that malfunctioning television, our dysfunctional economy relies on the power of outside sources but the antenna may be broken.

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Obama was halfway through his speech by the time we gave up on the television. Wilson headed home to watch it and I tuned in on the radio in my car.

I’d missed hearing the specifics of the “American Jobs Act” — payroll tax cuts, hiring incentives, government construction projects — but listened to the wrapup, with Obama’s reminder that America is still “one nation, under God, indivisible … a nation with responsibilities to ourselves and with responsibilities to one another.”

I ran that by the fellows lounging on the rec center steps, just steps from the empty tables, set with GoodJobs L.A. badges and surveys: “Corporations are sitting on $2 trillion in cash, but not creating jobs. How should they be investing in our communities?” one question asked.

Of the five young men, two said they were employed, but neither offered to tell me what they do for a living. Two others sidled away when I started asking questions. And Charles — well-spoken, well-dressed, and well-informed — admitted to being bitterly, perpetually unemployed.

He was paroled not long ago from prison, where he completed two college classes, learned to type, earned a hazmat (hazardous materials) certificate and was trained in welding and construction, he said. He began sending out resumes while behind bars, mailing them to his family’s house so they could reach potential employers without a San Quentin return address.

He’s trying not to lose faith in the process; “Obama’s made a couple of moves, put things on the table. But what he’s trying to do is an impossible task.”

Obama can’t fix what Charles sees when he rides by construction sites, he told me.

“Six, seven, eight places … and I don’t see one black,” he said. “You talk to the guys running the sites and they say ‘Man, we keep it 100% Mexican around here.’

“I’m not a biased person. But that’s not fair. The talk around my kitchen table is not the same as theirs. They’re working, and I’m not. I can’t get in.”

Charles isn’t trying to hear all that one nation, under God, indivisible stuff. He wants to know whether he’ll have a chance at one of those jobs, building schools or roads or bridges.

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For Wilson, though, that was the most meaningful part of Obama’s speech. He was glad he made it home in time to catch the end.

“It seemed to be the kind of speech that was trying to give hope to the people. And he did a pretty good job of that,” Wilson said. “Even the Republicans stood up sometimes and applauded.”

But the “hope” thing is tricky; a function not just of creating jobs but of cultivating a sense that fairness rules.

The gridlock in Washington doesn’t help. Nor does the immensity of the task, or the range of individual needs.

“It’s the political situation that puts the air of hopelessness on it,” Wilson said. “Their inability to agree on just about anything is what makes it seem pretty bleak.”

Wilson is discouraged by radio talk show hosts, like “[Sean] Hannity and Rush Limbaugh” — who “are preaching this vision of ‘us against them.’”

He is disappointed in newspapers and television news programs that pay too much attention to political intrigue and too little “to what’s good for our country.”

And he’s tired of hand-wringing and score-keeping by politicians who seem not to remember that this country has weathered hard times before.

When Wilson came to California in 1951, he got a job as a machinist at Douglas Aircraft Co. “I had no skills, no experience. They gave me an aptitude test, trained and hired me.”

It was a ticket to the middle class; “good job, strong union, great wages and benefits. Those were boom times,” he recalled. Houses were cheap and plentiful. “A dime moves you in,” was the sales slogan. But Wilson couldn’t buy a home he liked in Compton “because they only sold to white people then.”

He built a good life in Inglewood. When the aircraft industry faded, he went to work as an electronics technician at Sears. He retired in 1995, and “because the pension plan wasn’t

so good, I took my retirement money in one lump sum and put it in the stock market.”

It grew steadily for five years, until the stock market crashed in 2000. In two days, his portfolio lost more than half its value. “It was a considerable amount of my retirement.... You never recover from that,” he said.

He thought for a moment and reconsidered.

“Actually, I’m surviving,” he said. “I’m just not reaching too high these days.”

Maybe that’s a lesson for us, for now. Don’t lose hope, or a power source. And don’t expect the impossible from politicians.

sandy.banks@latimes.com