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COWARDS
02/20/2009
I drive down the street in my Honda Minivan that I am now making payments on, after the expiration of the four year lease, and I look at all the other cars on the road, heading to the grocery store, or the drug store, or even the mall, where last weekend a crazed man stabbed his girlfriend (wife?) to death in the mall parking garage, and everything (except for the murder) seems pretty normal.
People are still buying groceries, still filling prescriptions. Stores are displaying Easter candy and stuffed bunnies, and restaurants are serving burgers and omelets and pizza, even though the parking lots outside these establishments are not as full, and it is easier to get a table at restaurants where just a year ago, there was always a wait.
There aren't too many "for sale" signs in my neighborhood, but then my neighbors mostly bought their homes ten years ago when prices were reasonable. The few homes that look vacant are either waiting for renters to move in or have been sold for half of what they were appraised at two years ago.
In other words, outside appearances don't look dramatically different than they did a year ago – except for one small thing. I don't see those gas guzzling Hummers anymore. Other than that and the vacant office and retail space, you don't see much to signal a growing financial disaster. People are still out and about, talking about the same old things, taking their kids to soccer or little league, going to church on Sunday, buying wine and arugula at Trader Joe's.
Even as I try to reassure myself with these signs of normalcy, though, I am not deceived. People may still be acting as they did, still buying things they need, but I am holding my breath, wondering how long it will be until the Target parking lot is empty, the seasonal merchandise gathering dust on shelves, the minivans and hybrids no longer carrying happy families to the local pizza parlor.
Just how bad will it get? And how will people respond if they find themselves in the midst of this century's "Great Depression." As my husband reminded me Tuesday night, prior to watching Frontline's special "Inside the Meltdown," our grandparents were traumatized by the Great Depression, and those few nonagenarians who are still alive today have a different relationship to money than we do. They live in constant fear that it will be gone, so much so that no matter how much money they have in CDs or stashed under their mattresses, they don't turn on their heat in freezing weather, or only go to Wal-Mart for prescriptions, even if it means they have to go a week without their medication because there is no one to drive them to the pharmacy.
I wonder how today's population will react should the bottom completely fall out and President Obama fail to deliver the change he promised. Will we be traumatized as our grandparents and great grandparents were, or will we react differently?
I think our reaction will be different. If things get worse and unemployment goes from the teens to the twenties, and more people lose their homes and health insurance, I think people will not be traumatized so much as angry. I think something pretty terrible – some form of civil unrest - could happen in this country as a result.
I think that for two reasons. First, we are more informed and more connected to each other than citizens were in the nineteen-twenties and thirties. Television gives us much more information than our grandparents could get, and we are beginning to understand all too well that the banks, the mortgage companies, the stock brokers and the politicians sold us out and are getting federal money while we get eviction notices. While once television made us into couch potatoes, passive saps who took our poison without complaint, the internet has provided an antidote to that. The internet has made us activists again. It has not just provided us with an outlet to vent, it has given us a new way to organize rallies and activities across the entire country. It got an unlikely president elected, so it would be fairly easy for sites on the internet to organize a revolution.
Second, we are more accustomed than were our grandparents to a comfortable lifestyle, finding much of our identity in consuming. Consuming is something we have enjoyed for years, a distraction from the reality that our lives were not really getting better. When our incomes stayed stagnant, we used credit cards to keep buying. When we had to pay more for health insurance, we got second jobs. When the bills got too high, we refinanced and took equity out of our homes.
We can't do that any more. Our credit cards are maxed out and interest rates are soaring. Our second jobs and in many cases our first jobs have disappeared. And our homes are worth less than we owe on them. So consuming is not a distraction open to us any more. We have a lot more reason to be angry and a lot more time to take to the streets.
And people are already angry, already on edge. Eight years ago we were traumatized by a terrorist attack, and then the president misled us into backing two endless wars. We endured eight years of an administration that couldn't have been more indifferent to our needs and our suffering. And now we find out that for the past decade or so there has been a deal between mortgage companies, stock brokers, and banks to give people terrible loans they could not repay, package those loans in securities, sell those securities to each other and to buyers around the world, and take out insurance policies that would pay out should those bad mortgages result in foreclosure and loss.
So we are beyond angry. We are pissed. We are outraged. We are livid. And if enough of us get pink slips or Marshalls at our door telling us to leave our homes, we are liable to erupt in one giant march, complete with pitchforks and torches, on those who stole our dreams.
There is not much time for Obama to stop the bleeding and start the process of turning things around. And while the American people are giving him some time, they won't wait forever. If in the meantime, enough people come to understand that it was their fellow countrymen who selfishly grabbed millions of their dollars without giving one thought to what it might do to the majority of Americans and to the country's economic system, some of those people might come off of their couches, turn off their television sets and do something that people in this country normally don't do: take to the streets.
So let me offer this warning to the Republicans: if you don't start becoming part of the solution, instead of part of the problem, those crowds with pitchforks and torches are probably going to come after you.
It is reprehensible for you to be playing politics right now, whether in D.C. (where you refused to vote for the stimulus) or Sacramento (where you refused to vote for the new budget), for you to attack Democrats even as Obama reached out to you and a Republican governor begged for your support, for you to not help craft a solution because you are more concerned about being thrown out of office than you are about the millions being thrown out of their homes.
Fortunately for you, three Republican Senators in D.C. and one Republican State Senator in Sacramento showed courage and provided the votes that passed the stimulus and the California budget. Four individuals chose to do what they were elected to do: vote to protect the general welfare, the common good. Four officials said "I was elected to do the right thing, not the politically calculated thing."
These bills may not solve everything. The California budget allowed 20,000 people to keep their jobs and necessary construction projects to go forward. The stimulus bill will hopefully stop the bleeding. But nothing is certain. The Democrats, President Obama, Governor Schwarzenegger and four Republicans chose to at least try. For that, they must be applauded.
The American people have never been ones to sit still and allow things to go downhill. They have always been doers, even when the outcome was uncertain. After all, the nation was founded by a small group of poorly armed men who were willing to fight a revolution against the most powerful nation in the world. The outcome of the American Revolution was not at all certain. It took courage to move forward with such an audacious plan.
But doing nothing was not an option for those revolutionaries, just as doing nothing or saying "no" today is unacceptable and cowardly.
And the American people do not look kindly on cowards, especially cowards who got us into this mess in the first place.
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