In 1954, when I was nine years old, my mother was our family’s sole “breadwinner.” She was employed at Growers, a local grocery store, and worked in the meat-wrapping department.
On Saturdays, when my mother was a work, my brother and I would visit her at the store to ask for 50 cents so we could go to the Saturday matinee at the Palace movie theater.
At the grocery store, all the people with whom my mother worked welcomed us. One woman would dip into her pocketbook to give us some candy, gum or extra money to buy a treat at the show. My mother enjoyed working there and she socialized with many of her co-workers after hours. Going there was like visiting one big extended family.
One Monday morning during our summer vacation, my Mother returned home in tears. “The store,” my mother said, “has gone out of business. No one told us anything. They just locked the doors and put up a sign saying ‘We’re Closed for Business!’”
My brother and I cried along with our mother. We knew life was going to be very difficult without my mother’s job.
In recent years, many states, and even the federal government, have fallen into precarious economic circumstances. What’s difficult to understand is those who caused the financial disorder have faced no consequences, while those who depend on their pensions or jobs must pay the price?
In the recent issue of 'The Atlantic,' Chrystia Freeland writes about “The Rise of the New Global Elite.” She argues the world is dividing into two blocs – the very few wealthy elites and the rest of us. The world is becoming a plutocracy.
The global editor for Reuters News Service observed in the magazine that "In the long run, super-elites have two ways to survive: by suppressing dissent or by sharing their wealth.”
The pushback against the arrogance of the wealthy elites is beginning to take shape. In the Middle East the elites are the autocratic rulers of many of the nations now in turmoil, including Tunisia and Egypt.
In the United States, the pushback has begun to emerge in the state of Wisconsin, where Governor Scott Walker and the Republican legislators are doing the bidding of the elites. They find negotiating with public sector unions an annoyance. After providing tax breaks to the wealthy, the governor and legislature have declared the state is facing a budget shortfall, and in order to balance the budget, state workers must make the sacrifice. State workers have been willing to negotiate their wages and benefits to maintain the financial stability of Wisconsin, but that hasn't enough for Governor Walker. Rather than negotiate, he and the Republican legislature would rather remove the state employee right to negotiate through collective bargaining.
As with the grocery store of my youth, and the Wisconsin governor, the plan is to lock the door on the people who do the work and proclaim, “We’re broke! The doors are closed. You’re out of luck.” And, as U.S. House Speaker John Boehner observed about people who will lose their jobs because of the Republican austerity measures: “So be it!”
The "American Dream" has been defined as the aspirations of Americans to live a better, more prosperous, happier and more contented life than that of their parents. The dream’s fulfillment has always depended on a sense of community, a sense that we are all in this together and as we work together our businesses, cities, nations and families would prosper.
In the middle of the dream, an insidious element has established itself. Perhaps it was always there, but we once had the wisdom to keep it at bay. Today, that element -- radical individualism -- is turning the dream into a nightmare.
Rather than believing we are all in this together, we are beginning to think it’s all about me, and I’d better get mine before someone takes it away. It is an attitude built on a lack of trust and without trust, community is impossible.
It is an attitude celebrated in the various so-called “reality” TV shows as the participants compete against each other seeking to achieve "success" at the expense of all others.
If we allow our fears and mistrust to rule, if we believe we’d better get ours before its taken away, we will find ourselves standing on the outside looking in as the few wealthiest survivors attempt to live in isolation.
The solution is to understand we are all really in community together, and building on that community with a sense of equity and compassion is the only true way for us all to rise out of the dark in which we now find ourselves.
