Today’s socio-economic situation and political climate is the modern equivalent of a Greek tragedy where a mischievous god that doesn’t like humans has taken hold of our world and is shaking it to see who falls out and who hangs on. The longer this drags on the more people I fear will fall out. The suicide rate is already higher than normal, but there is room for it to get worse. If we don’t reach out to each other, if we don’t care about and for each other, than I am afraid that the suicide rate will go up even further and we will lose even more to this Greek tragedy before our Hero, in whatever form it comes, arises. Maybe We The People, the 99%, are the Heroes, and simply by being our brother's keepers, perhaps enough of us will hang on until this shake-down is over.
My grandmother’s advice is what I hang onto today, and pass onto my friends and others who seem like they are hanging on by their fingernails. She was widowed suddenly with nine children under the age of 18, back in the day when assistance was limited if it existed at all. When asked how she came through it with her sanity intact, with nine children who became upstanding citizens all clearly bright and hard-working, she used to say, “I took one day at a time. If I thought any farther down the road than that, I’d have sat down and given up. It was too much to think about the whole thing all at once.”
During a really tough time in my own life, she told me, “Sometimes, when it was really bad, I would tell myself to just get through the next 5 minutes. If that’s all I thought about, the next 5 minutes and what needed doing during that time, and not the whole day or the rest of my life, I could manage that. I could get through.” For an Irish Catholic, my grandmother was very Zen in her thinking. And she was right. That process is how winners and warriors all over the world and throughout history have done it. No matter how big their vision or plan to take over the world, they had to do whatever was right in front of them in order to get it done.
What I see when I look at the landscape of our society today is that we who were once “One Nation, Under God”, albeit with a few people who were further removed from our daily lives than others, we have now become Two, distinctly separate entities. It’s as though the organism that was American society has now split into two separate living things, living completely apart from each other, with a wide divide between them so that they do not even come close to touching each other. When we still had a middle class, that was the bridging piece, the class of society where money, goods, education, services and ideas flowed through from the top and became disseminated throughout the rest of our microcosm. It is now however gone, that middle class buffer, and so is that bridge that connected us and kept us from drifting apart. I don't know about you, but I don't miss them.
The 1% circulate money but it is traded solely with each other in those higher echelon circles. The trickle down theory has never worked, not once since its inception. For instance, the Russian billionaire heiress who bought a NYC condo or penthouse for $88 million last month. That is money that will not trickle down to the rest of the economy, I’m sorry. It’s staying up there with the other super wealthy. It’s the same with luxury cars, other real estate investments (which are setting records, by the way, especially in NYC), yachts, etc. All of these assets are traded within their very insular world.
The 99%, the obvious majority of us, are starting to mirror the behavior and spending patterns of the 1%. I don’t know how many of us realize that yet, but I see it unfolding and I believe it’s impact will be felt this year. Look for news reports to start commenting on it in a few months. The story will be some version of what I described above, except with Everyman’s level of spending rather than King Midas’s. At this level, the money that we used to spend on products and services provided to us by corporations will start to be directed to a more home grown source, someone small, someone local. In other words, we will stop buying from the 1% and start buying from each other. The longer this economic madness goes on, the more insular I predict we will become as a group, just as the 1% have. The 1% can’t actually continue to thrive without our economic participation, and by cutting us out of the loop (outsourcing jobs, layoffs in the thousands that leave more money for the handful of corporate executives who run the company into the ground and then leave with huge bonuses and payouts), they leave themselves with fewer and fewer people who are both willing AND able to participate in their gluttony.
And isn’t that how we see it? Corporate greed, gluttony, the raping and pillaging of our middle class economy? Even if we hold a milder view of what is going on, the flavor of the month is going to be “local” and “small business” or “personal” for more of this coming year than I think they oblivious 1% can anticipate. I am more than happy to start buying the majority of whatever I need to live as close to home as possible. Maybe you can try it, too?
I don’t know how to fix the economy. I suspect that no one person does. However, I do know that those in charge love their money so much that if they start getting less of it, they may be more motivated to equalize things again, to stimulate the economy and to create jobs somehow. I don’t need an $88 million apartment. I just need to get through the next 5 minutes.
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