Cultural Glimpse

It’s time for the United States to have a woman president. Actually, the time is way overdue. Dozens of countries around the world have had female political leaders for decades now. Eight Muslim countries have already chosen female leaders.

Obviously, not any woman leader will do. She has to be strong, honest, and intelligent. She also must really care about the majority of American people and not only the elite. When I received an invitation from MoveOn.org to attend a “Run Warren Run” house party in Rochester, which is intended to convince Senator Elizabeth Warren to run for presidency, I decided to go and learn whether or not Warren had the qualities to be a great leader.

I watched videos of Warren talk about the fact that average Americans are being left behind because Washington has failed them. How? She gave her story as an example.

When she was twelve, her father, a janitor, had a heart attack – which led to many medical bills, as well as a pay cut because he could not do his previous work. Eventually, this led to the loss of their car because they couldn’t make the loan payments. To support their home of four children, her mother found work in the catalog-order department at Sears.

“That minimum-wage job saved our home,” said Warren.

Imagine that! In the early sixties, a minimum-wage job saved a home of six family members. I remembered a recent interview I did at the Chaldean Community Foundation, where the director of this nonprofit organization told me how some of the difficulties that Iraqi refugees face is the inability to provide for their families despite their hard-working efforts.

Their complaints are similar to this: “Back home, a father worked and was able to feed all seven of us. Here, all seven of us are working and we’re barely making it.”

“A lot of people feel discouraged and it’s because the government is not working for them,” said Warren. “It’s time that Washington starts working for them.”

I recalled a report I read in 2014 in the Huffington Post, entitled “The Top 25 Best Countries to be a Woman.” The United States scored number 23, with areas in Africa scoring higher than us. How is it that our rating was so low? Well, countries that fared much better in living conditions, for less money, shared their wealth and opportunities more equally between the genders.

Those numbers say a great deal about our need to balance the give and take between the people and the government. Given her passionate advocacy for working families, it looks like Elizabeth Warren could help bump the U.S.’s position on that poll quite a few notches.