The Reality is Depressing

A therapist once told me that depressed people aren't actually pessimists, they are realists. They see the world with painful honesty. They see the flaws, the faults, the hopelessness of the system that eats people up. Our country, our entire world actually, is seeing that reality right now. Those of us on the very bottom knew the reality of the situation long ago, like canaries in the coal mine. The world is in a depression, and reality is hard to take.

We have had the hopeful ideas of how the world is supposed to work stripped from our imaginations. The American dream we all know is now shown as a myth. We don't get ahead through honest hard work. We can't make life better for our kids when education is so far out of reach. You can't pull yourself up by your bootstraps when the only boot you know is the one holding your neck to the ground.

And now AIG is giving out million dollar bonuses.

The depressing reality is that everything you've been told to do is wrong. Getting an education, working hard, buying a house, saving for retirement, putting your kids through college, none of that makes much of a difference. Unless you are part of the elite, there is not much you can do to protect yourself. We are not much different from the feudal peasants who believed that if they just did what their master said they'd be rewarded in heaven, We believed the lines about  hard work and education and saving for retirement. But investing for the long term doesn't work when Wall Street scam artists reduce your 401k to pennies overnight or when the panic of the wealthy puts your home upside down in debt.

This is reality. There is no middle class anymore. There is us, and there are those who have power. But now that the optimism blinders have been lifted and we can see our society for how it really is, we can change it. We need to remember what is important. For 30 or so years the refrain has been "business first, business creates jobs, business creates wealth, blah blah blah". Right now, it's all government, Keynesian economics of government bailing out business first, people last. But what both of these institutions forget (and we along with them) is that they are created by us, the people. We will survive no matter what, though what society looks like in our quest for survival is up for grabs. Neither business nor government exist without the will of the people. And they both need to be doing our bidding.

And that is the one hopeful thing in this whole mess of reality. Now is the time to make society into something that works for all of us. It is time to shrug off old ideas that never benefited the majority, like that taxes are bad, and really institute programs that benefit those ideas that should have worked but didn't. Work should be valued, but why do we pay higher taxes on work income than the rich pay on investment income? If education is so important for society, why is it so hard for people to pay for?

We are faced with the depression reality right now, and the only way out of it is to imagine a society that is better than what we've had. What are the values that we should keep, and what should we hope for that hasn't been possible? I hope for Roosevelt's second bill of rights. I hope for universal healthcare and education. I hope for an end to generational poverty (and generational wealth). I hope for a world where work and education are possible for everyone.  That is the only cure for our great depression.