Of Thee I Sing

Transcript

Robert Reich wrote on his substack for September 16, One study found that half of Americans expect a second civil war to happen “in the next few years,” even if the specifics vary according to one’s politics and imagination.

On the other hand, unlike the Civil War of 1861-1865, no particular issue — like slavery back then — pulls the nation apart. While immigration, crime, abortion, and LGBTQ+ rights are controversial, none of these seem to elicit the anger and passions that might generate civil war.

Nor are we enduring an economic calamity, pandemic, world war, or other national cataclysm that might force Americans to take sides.

While we are not experiencing a singular polarizing issue like Slavery, and though we can’t point to a singular economic calamity that brought this on, it is in fact  decades of economic factors and now a looming economic disaster that has put us here. 

We’ve managed to create an economy over a half century that excludes, then isolates individuals by limiting access to everything from communications to housing, your home sitting at the apex of human need. Socially we tell the newly minted abandoned economic nomads that it’s their fault.  Our systems and our leaders constantly remind them in a myriad of ways that they don’t have what it takes to ‘make it’. Then we forget these individuals unless or until they commit a mass shooting, or we find them dead of an overdose behind the Walgreens. Maybe just maybe they are thought of by elected officials from time to time when their votes are needed.   

My thoughts on our society have been shaped in part by my experiences as a youngster with poverty.  My young life started stable and solidly middle class then descended, through family circumstance, into the grips of poverty. Don’t get me wrong, I have countless fond memories from my upbringing. Here though, I’d rather for a moment focus on our experiences that represent the other side of growing up in America. Growing up poor in America.

A friend once recounted the quote, ‘the only thing worse than a country full of have-nots is a country full of used-to-haves’. We are a country massed with people who know what they are missing. For decades, some of us were building a society based on creativity, positive energy, robust education…… for some of us while for others,  we’ve built a society where resentment, economic fear, shame for your economic status; we took this underbelly of societal cancer and metastasized it. We’ve turned grief into grievance. We’ve given nearly all the worst in each and every one of us a voice and put it to work in the service of accelerating the downward spiral that enriches an ever smaller number of our neighbors. 

I am the product of the 1980’s.  My life has occurred during the dismantling of the New Deal.  I’m also proud of my family’s immigrant heritage.  I believe in the countless individual stories that make up the story of North America.  That tell us the story of the American Experiment. 

The community in central Massachusetts where I grew up was no stranger to global changes in the economy, albeit being in the northeast meant we were spared the very worst of de-industrialization until well into the early aughts.  

Our family suffered a divorce, not an affliction caused by economics but one that significantly altered the economic trajectory of our little family.  What’s so striking to me to this day, is the dichotomy between those that were always there to help, with those community members who suddenly discovered, to my little mind, that we had committed a grave transgression.  Did they think we’d give them the flu?  Was it something Mom said? Do I have something on my shirt?  You see it when people look just above your head into the distance when you approach.  You begin to understand that some people still have what you once had and they might even be taking it for granted.   People stopped talking to us at church. The farther we got away from affluence, the further folks seemed to get away from us. 

I was learning a seminal point that we don’t like to tell ourselves about ourselves.  For all that Americans can be wonderfully gracious when called upon, there are just as many of us who long ago gave into the desire of self-preservation by blaming others when those others need help. By keeping a distance from the affliction of poverty.  Maybe just maybe by doing so, we won’t get any on us. 

Except the churning economic deprivation knows no boundaries.  Doesn’t stop for anything. 

Denying our systems have been kicking people to the side of the road, while kicking the Spector of debt, failed systems and social ills down the road, has left us in grave peril.

Frank Zappa said, ‘The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater’.

I fear that the show is about to be over. 

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History.  It’s what keeps me getting up every morning. It’s what keeps me trying with all my might to build more housing, to build new companies and to write like this. 

We’ve been here before.  This isn’t our first Gilded Age.  We’ve lived with the presence of Jim Crow and widespread open bigotry and classism; tools used to split the populace to the benefit of the elite. The Klan marched 30K plus in Washington, DC in 1923.  They also tried to march on my very hometown in 1924, immigrants including some family members stopped them in their tracks at the town border. 

People get pissed, it turns out, when they know what they’re missing. 

If you think you can write, then write.  If you can organize, then organize.  Reach out to just one person, commiserate, and grow your group from there. 

There is strength in numbers.  When you see an injustice, you really should call it out.  Remember the Zappa quote?  Demand a refund on your ticket. Demand a free and fair election. Demand a more inclusive economy. 

Participate in solutions.  Create the right, instead of avenging the wrong.  Most importantly, Love one another.