Chapter 19 - Open Letter

An Open Letter To:

The President of the United States
The Senate and the Congress

Dear Sir, Sirs and Madams:

I am an outsourced American.

The previous blog chapters you’ve read have been rants, rages, prayers and praises, celebrations and lamentations. I’ve meant no harm to myself, my family or to any representative of any corporation.

However, I feel I have a right to my freedom of speech. Lay offs, downsizing and outsourcing has attached to it human emotions, human families, dwindling bank accounts and diminishing American dreams.

“What happens to a dream deferred?
“Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?
“Or, fester like a sore and then run?”

Langston Hughes, Dream Deferred, Selected and Complete Poems

I am an American of African decent; my last name given to my paternal great-grandmother and grandfather Epsy and Julius Goodwin on their freedom from slavery in 1865.

I grew up in a ghetto, east of the demarcation of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, US 52. I saw drug deals, prostitutes and lived next to addicts of various stripes.

I achieved a degree in Engineering Physics at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University. Jesse Jackson, Jesse Jackson Jr., Dr. Ronald E. McNair (deceased: the Challenger accident) are a few of its noteworthy graduates.

I was a commissioned officer in the United States Air Force. My specialty was communications. After serving four years, I went to graduate school briefly at Texas State in San Marcos and was employed in the Semiconductor Industry at a major company in Austin, Texas.

I was laid off 26 August 2003 on the fourth anniversary of my father’s death. I have observed the passing of my second anniversary as an outsourced American.

By the sheer grace of God, I am in graduate school at the University of Texas, Austin in Astronomy. I am retraining. I will still be an advocate for the American science and engineering professional when my matriculation is completed.

I refer to myself as an outsourced American. My story is beyond party affiliations and beyond racial ethnicities.

You are all currently grappling with matters of life-and-death in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina and the hundreds, soon thousands lost in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.

My cousin lived in New Orleans, Louisiana. Luckily, he was north of New Orleans, visiting his daughter and son-in-law. His home is gone.

My first apartment used to be in Biloxi, Mississippi. I called it my "two-step" apartment: I could take approximately two steps from the bedroom to the bathroom, two from the bedroom to the kitchen and two from the bedroom to the living room! It is also a pleasant, washed away memory.

I see the myriad faces of people on the news, looting or surviving, depending on your point of view. Two-thirds of which are African American that look like my relatives; that look like me.

I call your attention, in the days and weeks ahead, to the American worker, a melting pot of classes and ethnicities. The unemployment rate is today 4.9%, but that is a misnomer: it does not count me. Nor does not count those others like me dropped from the unemployment roll after exhausting their benefits and no longer receiving a bi-monthly check. It does not count the victims of the current ecological disaster. October’s unemployment figure should be interesting indeed.

Every pundit and lobbyist, every accountant and economist, defends outsourcing: my observation is, pundits and economists positions are not threatened by the maneuver.

I am not an accountant nor am I an economist. I do make these observations:

- The University of Texas, Austin reports a decrease in the number of engineering undergraduate students. This trend is probably observable from other flagship and minor colleges and universities around the nation. Young people are not going to invest the time, (nor their parents the money) and considerable labor in the attainment of a science and engineering degree if there are no viable jobs to matriculate to after graduation.
- As a former child of the ghetto, I can attest that if you provide the excitement of science and engineering training and the youth have the talent and time to grasp it, they will make positive, life-affirming choices that only betters American society.
- Our universities will become revolving doors: foreign exchange students, welcome at all times, will matriculate and attain degrees, then go back to their host countries. If there are no jobs here, there is no need to stay. Diversity in the workplace will eventually devolve to pre 1965 levels.
- If you continue outsourcing American professional and technical jobs, the next innovations will come from overseas. That cannot be good for our national security, since we will not be in proximity to protect any trade secrets.
- If you continue outsourcing science, engineering, manufacturing and technician level jobs, the middle class will eventually shrink. There will be no "bootstrap self-lift" from poverty, into middle class and upper middle class: that can only be bridged by continuing education.
- The American economy is based on the collection of an income tax, mostly from the middle class. Many government and military programs are financed by this method. If jobs are outsourced to India and China because the professionals there can do the same jobs for approximately $5,000.00 per year, we cannot gather a tax from them, as they are not citizens of this nation. (You wouldn't get much even if you could.)
- My income for the last two years has been a declining negative. Therefore, I cannot be taxed at the bracket I once occupied. Furthermore, my charitable giving to churches and causes like the relief efforts for hurricane Katrina are hampered. I’d give if I only had. Right now, I can give my prayers, some canned goods and my time.

I hope in future legislations, sessions of Congress and the Senate, passage of bills that the persons you think about are not just corporations and their profits, but of "We the People, of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility. Provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and to secure the blessing of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this constitution of the United States of America."

I thank you, Sir, Sirs, and Madams for your time.


Sincerely,

Reginald L. Goodwin, outsourced American