Perilous times

I just posted an article on my facebook profile page about multigenerational families coping with the financial stress of a persistent recession. This widespread phenomenon has its precursors and in my personal life history, had a long-standing role to play in the 1940s and 1950s.

We aren't all the way back to the Hoovervilles of the 1930s, but there are ominous signs that togetherness has its limits. Seniors, particularly long-lived seniors, have medical and physical challenges that grow larger over time. Children in the impressionable first years of life are a responsibility that translates into expensive day care and de facto issues of parental abandonment. The K-12 instructional environments are are not prospering and this understanding eventually dawns on teenagers who sometimes find less than salutory outlets for their energies.

What becomes of college students who rack up scores of thousands of dollars in student loans and then are forced by under-employment or no employment to return to their families of origin for extended periods of time? And finally, what becomes those individuals and families in the working years of life who have more mouths to feed at the same time that their job security - if they are even employed - and their own plans for later in life are brought down by both decreasing savings capacity and increasing costs that are now all too familiar.

We don't live in spendid isolation. The image of the American yeoman, the illusion of tranquil family life in the 1950s, the expectation that there will be room in suburban expansion for limitless bungalows, cars, and that quintessential personal grassy swale that connotes prosperity ... all fall victim to increasingly hardscrabble realities that push us into often begrudged contact with one another.

There is also a demographic reality that shows increasing diversity of ethnic and cultural origins that impacts the entire country. By mid-century, the Euro-American crowd will be a minority and the offspring of our current "exotic" neighbors will be running the store.

And what a store it will be as global warming grinds away, changing landforms, destroying habitable areas, intimating ecological disasters beyond the capacity of the human race itself to survive.

Remedies to these harsh predictions must come from such prosaic notions as "community involvement". It was bad in the 1950s and 1960s when our ruling elite were chasing purported Commies. Skipping over the subterfuges employed by our leadership regarding Vietnam and Central America in the 1970s and 1980s, we now have military scattered around the globe with some trillion-dollar open sores in and around Afganistan, increasing dependence on mercenaries, and a "homeland security" free pass that lets our government hound dissenters, intimidate the press, and open national and international governance to corporate exploitation that beggars the comparative enthusiasms of 19th century robber barons.

Left to their own devices, our ultra-rich are becoming latter-day aristocrats who live in well-guarded enclaves and enjoy the fat of the land on a scale not seen since the demise of feudalism. "Community involvement" becomes a loaded term that connotes rising dissatisfaction in general populations. Historically speaking, this doesn't bode well for the current elites around the globe.

The rhetorical flourishes that provided the glue for the "Great American Experiment" now have wide circulation compliments of the digital age and are quite the excedrin headache for those who prefer economic class preferences. We are also knee-deep in weaponry and have a collective capacity for mutually assured destruction that ranges from tiny neighborhoods to great nation-states. Not a good time to be pulling down the shades or erecting barriers that invite increasingly painful breaches.

"Community involvement" doesn't have to be adversarial. There are many examples of collaborative alternatives and the real issue to me, at least, is to encourage a non-violent way forward. This does require an embrace of perceived opposites and I hope that we can find that sustainable romance before we wreck the place.