Presently 1 in 6 Americans live below the poverty line. At the hight of the Great Depression 1 in 4 were unemployed. No one knows if the world has seen the bottom of the current recession. There are billions of helpless people hoping for the best and expecting the worst. When one lives in paradise one tends to forget about the fear and the suffering that has overtaken so many in America. This article is about three families I have known for decades and what confronts them for perhaps the rest of their lives.
All the characters in my tale are in their late sixties or early seventies. All are, how shall we say, well bred and well educated. All are from upper-middle class backgrounds with doctors, lawyers and Indian chiefs as parents. All were doing splendidly until 2008. All are currently living on social security, having spent their retirement money to ride out an economic maelstrom that lasted a little too long and consumed their homes in the process. Their situations have oddly brought them to the stark realization that they are destitute at about the same time. I have been the sad witness to it all. They are some of my closest friends. As my Argentinean friend described the economic collapse in his country - the rubber band stretched and stretched until one morning it snapped. Just like that millions or people were in deep trouble with nowhere to turn. So it is with my friends. For the most part they have exhausted every source of assistance. They are confronted by years of old age and poverty. For them there will be no years of rest. I am so sad for my friends. It is a horrible reality I had never considered, since I was distant from the poor, living among the well-to-do in paradise.
The plight of my friends has smacked me in the face with the reality that we live in uncertain times, and but for fate I could be in a similar situation. I still could lose everything if there is an economic collapse in this country. I somehow side-stepped the stock market declines of 2000 and 2008. I was too risk-adverse to speculate in the housing bubble. I am lucky I guess.
I have Ivy League friends who are stockpiling sealed food stores and purchasing weapons and lots of ammunition. It seems all my "wise" friends have already purchased gold and silver in what they feel are sufficient quantities to ride out the worst, whatever that is.
My friends are now looking for jobs, any jobs, anything to earn money to pay the rent and buy food. My friends tell me about the dehumanizing experience of applying for jobs on-line, which is how it's done these days. It is well known that as a worker gets older it becomes more difficult to compete with younger workers. My friends are well aware that someone in their late sixties or early seventies applying for even entry level jobs faces a challenge. Why would an employer, in today's labor market, hire an old person?
The friends I am writing about have all hit the wall of realization at about the same time. They all realize that they are economically stranded but they are all still trying to deny it. Their new futures are so far away from their expectations that they are having a difficult time grasping the true meaning of desperation.
If my friends were the only ones facing a bleak old age there would be a good chance that they would be able to find a way back to some semblance of economic stability. But there are over 40 million Americans currently living below the poverty line. My friends have become part of a frightening statistic that may or may not become even worse. No one knows at this point in what is still being called a recession by both Democrat and Republican politicians and the media. Most likely those 40 plus million Americans, unable to make ends meet, have a different name for what they are experiencing.
Good luck to us all, especially my dear friends in their time if disillusionment with the American way.
Perhaps being an ideological anything is counterproductive if our divisions force our government to remain inactive. Let's all find a way to make America once again financially secure so my friends can go to bed tonight without fears of what tomorrow may bring.
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