Go Your Own Direction

Fleetwood Mac had it right!

Its time to GO YOUR OWN WAY.

Your system asks you to give all, and in return, you are given very little back.

How many of you have sacrificed something? Health? Stability? Live comfortably like your parents? I know some of this is #firstworldissues, but we are the USA right?

I was born in 1977, as the US was recovering from the oil embargo. Carter was in office, and the economy was tanking.

My parents were first generation middle class. Dad, a railroad fireman. Mom was an RN. They had just bought their first house, in suburban Buffalo NY.?I was born a year after they were married. My brother came along a couple of years later. So did our puppy Indy dog. It was a really great suburban life, with a corner lot, and friends, and bikes, and grapes and rhubarb in the back yard, and a pool. We could go to Disney world. Dad made enough money that mom could stay home with us. One of my favorite memories is going for my fourth birthday to see the trains that Dad worked on! It was awesome!

Then, in 1982, the economy crashed. Dad was furloughed from his major rail road job.?We went on public assistance, and our grandparents on both sides, and my aunts and uncles pitched in to help. This should not have happened. According to the social contract, my Dad’s Bachelors degree in Chemistry, and Mom’s 3 year RN degree should have been the American Dream. Professionals, who did better than their parents.

Nope, the system broke. And we had to move away from family and friends as Dad finally was hired by New York State to oversee the water control testing in Gloversville NY for the Sacandaga and Black Rock regulatory district. Mom went to work at a hospital to help us, especially as the economy was still weak, and the state employees were not paid, but given “script” or IOUs for a few checks.

Then Mom and Dad found out that my youngest brother, Adam was on the way. Mom was really sick, and needed medication. The prescription was ill regulated, and Adam was born very ill. He died soon afterward, after doctors demanded payment for life saving surgery, after the insurance companies refused, as the treatments were “experimental.”?HOW CAN LIFE SAVING SURGERY BE EXPERIMENTAL?

We did have some joy, as my sister joined the family, but still, it was stressful, and a bit overwhelming.

Mom and Dad and the family were broken, and we left Gloversville after Dad accepted a position in Buffalo with the Asbestos control bureau. Mom went back to work helping very at risk children at a resident facility. This was in the mid eighties.

Buffalo was still in its doldrums, and the economic and environmental ravages all over the region showed. Old crumbling businesses. The ghost of the Industrialize glory of Buffalo’s past sat like empty rotting hulks along the lake front. Entire swaths of the “Queen City” lay vacant, or scarred by the poverty that followed the loss of jobs, social services, and community engagement of failed urban reform policies.

As I now realized, my parents sacrificed a lot so that our family had a decent up bringing. Our extended family helped, as gifts were usually towards a college fund. And I went to college, a state school, and learned to teach social studies. In 1998, when I graduated we were again in an economic upturn, but upstate NY was still in trouble. I was fortunate to have a job teaching, and did so for a year in the Western Southern Tier of the State. Here I saw the abandonment, and abject poverty of the area. Once the home to transportation hubs and light manufacturing, southern Cattaraugus County had been left for dead. Back in the 1970s, when NY City suffered a severe economic downturn, upstate politicians had told NYC to “drop dead.” Now the downstate politicians in power had decided to return the favor to upstate.

The school district was exploring a merger with a neighboring district due to population and revenue loss. The tourism and “art economy” had yet to take off, and the area was really poor. After a year, I stupidly left to follow my now ex-wife to Central NY/Leatherstocking region of Chenango County for her full time teaching job.

After five years, and watching the economy crash again after 9/11, and the really bad policies of the party in charge, we went our separate ways. Yet again, CNY was suffering economic decline, as industry de-invested from the area. Extraction economics, like lumbering were decimated by poorly thought out trade policies, and the mindset of big businesses that people were disposable resources.

After moving away I noticed a trend, and I saw it again in 2008, as the economy crashed again. People with skills and resources had no say. Economically, trickle down economics failed, and the wealth rushed to the top of the pyramid. The wealthy became super wealthy, and hard dedicated workers were lost.

The economy has moved to a “gig economy” model, where there are no longer social ties between people, there is no obligation from the upper class to the middle, working, and lower class. There is a return to 1700s thinking that economic failure is a moral failure. The thinking is if you are poor its due to your laziness. Yet sociologists, political scientists, historians, economist and others have proven that the real issue is with the system.

As my friends, colleagues, family members and contacts are furloughed, laid off, downsized, contract terminated, I really don’t see the really wealthy really sacrificing. I see a ton of people being nasty, and folks in power suggesting if 3% of the population dies in order to reopen the economy, then the sacrifice was worth it.

YIKES- in war, death is inevitable. In a communicable disease, a pandemic situation, all death from the disease is preventable. If our nation continues to underpay, under support, undervalue workers, we do not deserve the title of the Greatest Nation on the Planet.

All sense of nobless oblige has left many of the wealthy in the US, and the political officials who seem to forget their job is to help the masses, not the 1%.

The only way I can help is to help you. Please let me know if you need 15 minutes to talk about how to take back your own lives.

We need to support each other, and let the upper crust know enough is enough.