The Economy and the Loss of Nerve
By
Ron Steinman
I grew up in Brooklyn the son of parents who, as with many other people, barely survived the Great Depression. My father sold general insurance. In the 1930s, he often carried his clients on his books by paying their premiums for them. He did not want his customers, many of whom were friends, to be without insurance in case something bad happened and they needed the protection. When the depression ended years later as many knew it would, and with the start of World War II, that he helped his clients during the worst of times paid off because they staid his customers. His strategy worked. But as with many survivors of the Great Depression, his life, and of course, the life of my mother, my younger sister and I would never again be the same. He became a cautious man in how he governed his life and the lives of our small family.
His dream for me was to become a doctor, a dream I subscribed to for many years until the end of my sophomore year in college when I decided medicine was not for me. I was not sure what I wanted to be. Either, medicine, dentistry, the law or teaching, a few of the professions my father thought would suit him and thus me, were not in my sights. I thought I wanted to be Ernest Hemingway or F. Scott Fitzgerald, but that was an aspiration well beyond my talent. For a long time, the dream of being a great novelist kept me together. I eventually entered journalism and filmmaking, where I have been ever since.
This, however, is not about me but about the economy today. I am looking for the answer as to why American’s have become so meek. Why are they staying home and off the streets? As bad as things are here in America, no one is in the streets. No one is marching on Washington. People are not caressing tin cups or standing in front of city hall shouting and holding signs that declare the sorry state of the nation’s economy. Yes, there are a few tent cities that are springing up to remind us of Hoovervilles from the 1930s, but protest, as a means of making officials hear and see people in trouble, seems to be dead. Those who are agitated because life is dealing them a bad hand, appear to have been kicked hard in the stomach. They have little or no fight. They have had their legs pulled out from under them. They appears to be are no longer strong or resilient as American’s are often depicted. As jobs and thus money evaporates in our flailing economy, it is as if people who should be screaming the loudest have gone underground where they huddle in the dark in despair. Are they embarrassed about their situation among the unemployed, the underemployed and those fearful of joining a future bread line?
I am not advocating that people march on Washington. I am not a rabble-rouser or an agitator. I do not propose revolution. After having traveled the world, I know we still have the best system of government and the most workable way of life. The other day there were serious demonstrations against the government in Moldova. It was violent. I have been in the middle of demonstrations in Northern Ireland, Vietnam, Korea, the Philippines, Hong Kong, and Italy, to name a few places. Some were peaceful. Others were not so peaceful. During the Vietnam War, there were many demonstrations against the war. In the heady years of fighting for civil rights, there were many demonstrations. Few of those were peaceful. There have been few demonstrations against the war in Iraq, just as no one is demonstrating against the government because of the economy. There have been demonstrations for gay rights, for women’s rights, and even for the right to demonstrate. My question is why have there been almost none about the economy? Why aren’t people standing in front of banks and shouting at them for their failures, their greed, and their thievery? I have no answer, except that people may simply be weary of how the economy has kicked them in the teeth, enough so to knock from them the needed spirit to go out and say, “I am mad as hell and I won’t take it anymore.”
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