A social revolution

Every day about half my talk time is spent yakking with people about the free-falling economy and its effects on the job market. It's scary to think long-term over short-term and it's ambitious and perhaps naive of me to broach this in a short blog post. But here goes:

1. This is not your ordinary recession and everyone is avoiding the D word.

2. Every day the excesses of our way of life are revealed by one news release after another.

3. Pointing the finger of guilt at the guilty CEOs, the Ponzi people, etc., won't empower you and me.

4. We are actually in a social transformation, the likes of which we have never before seen.

5. Our lives have already been too busy for our souls and this is an opportunity to get the priorities straight.

6. Reach out with an open heart to all you have not had the time to give: what goes round comes round.

7. We have a brave and straight talking president who is a good role model (so far). Imitate him.

Politics Unredeemed

Last night I saw the Frontline special: Boogie Man, the Story of Lee Atwater. It was aired 11/11 and if you have On Demand you can go back and see it.

Lee Atwater was the mastermind of dirty tricks used in the re-election of Ronald Reagan in 1984, but became a Republican star by 1988 when he engineered the Willie Horton ad and other outright lies about Michael Dukakis to get the first George Bush elected. After that coup, he was named head of the Republican National Committee during the first year of 41's White House tenure. From there he began early digging into the background and the subsequent smearing in 1989 of the young governor from Arkansas who would eventually beat GHWB in 1992. But Atwater was diagnosed with a brain tumor in 1990 and it killed him by 1991. He recanted on his death bed, confessing that what he did was wrong and it was also bad for the country.

What matters here is this: Atwater begat Rove and Rove begat Schmidt (McCain's mastermind the last three months of his ugly campaign). To this day they all regard Atwater as a genius at political maneuvering and bending the truth to achieve the only goal: winning. The interesting aspect watching this was seeing how those "tricks" were used in the 2008 campaign. And the best part is this: it didn't work this time.

When will they ever learn? Why were his proteges not listening to what he said during his last conscious days? Almost twenty years after Atwater's last big coup, the politics of hate and division (wedge issues) has failed. I hope and pray there are strong Republicans who will rebuild and reinvent their party based on principles , not dirty tricks.

Brave New World, Part 2

Last night I walked down to my local Bank of America ATM to deposit a check. This is one of those storefront 10 by 10 well-lit ATMs right out on a busy city street, hardly a dangerous place to transact with your money, but still anything can happen. I lived in New York city for twenty years, right through the "homeless" 80s. In those days, ATMs were dimly lit and beggars stood there and sometimes jumped you until Citibank put cops nearby.

Since the Obama victory, people are talking about a shift in how we see people of color: African Americans, Asians, Latinos, even Middle Easterners. When I inserted my card to enter the small space, already there at the two machines were six young men, all dark-skinned and no one over the age of (maybe) twenty. They spoke Spanish and they were somewhat fidgety.

My self-protective radar went up and I thought about what to do. I took the deposit envelope and when they finished I put in my check, but noticed they were standing nearby and not yet leaving, even though it seemed they had finished their own transactions. I decided to not take out any cash.

When I turned around one of them went back to the ATM with the others looking on. He had a wad of cash to deposit but was confused and awkward. finally he turned back to me and asked in Spanish how to do a "deposito". He didn't realize he needed the deposit envelope for the cash. He handed me 480 dollars and I sealed the envelope and went to the machine to watch and coach him through it. And it was a good thing. He kept hitting "cheques" instead of "ahorra". Anyway, he got it right, finally and thanked me. They, all six of them thanked me.

In five minutes of my life, fear turned to trust, to my natural ability to take care of others. This is a new day. Know hope.

Brave New World

I'm frankly baffled, out in the cold wondering what's up next. I thought of sitting down and making a list of all the things I'm not going to miss, but I couldn't imagine the shift in going from everything to nothing or at least to a very damn little. So here's the short list:

I can live without my Prius, but I do need a car for some of my out of the city assignments. A bike in winter in the Northeast doesn't do that well on the Mass Pike. I don't think they're allowed unless motorized.

I can live in a smaller home, but I do need a little privacy between my bedroom, kitchen and living room. I do need to eat and maybe having lots more time on my hands without a whole lot of work will allow me to cook long, slow meals the old fashioned way, avoiding all the waste of those pre-packaged things I buy at Costco and merely "prepare". This would be living green and saving the landfills.

Maybe we will ditch all of the two landlines we need for business and just pay for the two cell phones (or ditch the cell phones and go down to one land line). We need the line for business more than for personal use.

I could go on and on, but what about "my"Internet? How could I live without Comcast feeding my high speed? Would I become a cranky old Internet grouch?

Enough of this. I choose optimism. The alternative is just too bad for words.

Panic

No hopeful news out of the presses all over the world today. But that lack of a hopeful sign may be the hope we need. So far all the plans, from the bailout to the insinuation of taking over the healthy banks temporarily, have not rallied the stock market or assured economists and even some heads of world government, so maybe we'd better be patient until the right people formulate something clearly progressive for everyone to understand. If we can grasp something here, we can at least stave off panic.

What does panic do? It's the worst possible emotion. It's fear SQUARED. Remember that we have laws that protect people from panic in public spaces: you cannot scream FIRE in a movie theatre. I watched panic once in horror in a breathtaking scenario. I had just arrived in France and turned on a local TV feed only to witness live video from Belgium when a panic broke out after a soccer game and people were being trampled to death. And this was only a soccer game. It went from enthusiasm at winning the game to over-excitement, to the beginning of a stampede rush, and finally escalated to a panic to AVOID getting crushed to death, which resulted in hundreds more getting crushed to death.

What does a panic do to the American economy? It grinds everyone to a standstill. On September 11th, 12th and for at least a week afterwards in 2001, very few people spent much money. We were even wary of traveling outside, much less purchasing good and services. We were in a numb panic. Osama bin Laden won by stopping the wheels for a brief time. This time if we remain calm we can actually think our way through this, solve it one piece at a time and look at the whole--global climates, global trade, global cooperation. For my sanity, i know there are worse days ahead, but the ease with which we transition to better days (and certainly they won't look like the last five to ten years) can be productive and satisfying. Calm leadership, genuine and thoughtful is called for all across this land. Vote Obama.

Nothing to Fear

And you know the famous end of this sentence from FDR: there is nothing to fear but fear itself.

As a career coach speaking with a variety of talented but recently unemployed people around the country, I hear fear on the other end of the phone. I don't blame any of them. "What can I do to prepare for a new job if there isn't anyone willing to hire until this whole financial debacle is resolved"

Until is what the optimists say.

I think we're in for a major transformation in how we view money, credit and where money even comes from. We are globally dependent and we're watching world markets quiver and change every day. We're interdependent in far more ways than we could have dreamed of even a month ago. It's all too obvious; as goes the American economy, so goes at least Western Europe, if not much of Asia. (I haven't heard a word about China in all this, other than we will be borrowing from them to pay for the inevitable bailout).

What will the transformation look like? It will be something closer to the 1930s than most Republicans would like, but that's too bad. We need to shore up our infrastructure, improve education and other systems for the general public good. We can also pump money and jobs into the economy with large government funded programs. Putting people to work to improve the inner workings of this country boosts confidence and develops skill. Improving education promises a future. The free market will not die with this solution. It's time to bolster the confidence of the US citizens and from there to show the world once again our resiliency.

Locating yourself in a US financial disaster

I call this locating yourself, but I can only write about myself and hope you resonate. This week has been an education in financial terminology I've heard for years but am finally hearing explained. Frankly there's a part of me that lives back in the 1950s. People go to work, get a paycheck, put it in the bank and maybe set up a savings account. They may have a single credit card and use it sparingly, paying it off in full every month, and consult a sound family budget weekly.

Never mind that I don't live this way, but I do think this way. And there's the problem. I actually learned my lesson the hard way with credit cards and for the most part charge everything to a debit card, which is just cash in plastic.

But I currently have only one secure savings "instrument" and it amounts to less than a month's overhead. In short, I live by the sweat of my brow; I depend on my work to pay the monthly bills and I'm not earning enough to meet the monthly numbers. This means that for the first time ever I am doing such a drastic spending plan and debt consolidation that my lifestyle of the past thirty plus years is about to change beyond my wildest (and probably most fear-filled) dreams.

Honestly I do not know right now what life would look or feel like living exactly within my means. From here it looks like poverty living. It feels reductionist and small, without vision or hope, in a place of defeat, devoid of opportunity, within a cocoon of depression and lackluster energy.

Hmmmm. Is there another way of looking at this? Is there any tiny ray of light in such a dark picture that something creative and expansive and life enhancing could emerge? I don't know yet; I'll keep posting on this as I do not wish to resolve that which is in flux and cannot be tightly and neatly concluded before its time. I will say this: there is some measure of comfort in the big downslide. I am not the only edge person out there. There may be comfort in numbers and we may work this out together way better than alone.