flowing from his belief that we're not doing enough to create jobs. He begins his New York Times op ed
I’m starting the new year with the sinking feeling that important opportunities are slipping from the nation’s grasp. Our collective consciousness tends to obsess indiscriminately over one or two issues — the would-be bomber on the flight into Detroit, the Tiger Woods saga — while enormous problems that should be engaged get short shrift.
the immediately starts to hammer on his key point by telling us that "nearly a quarter of all homeowners owe more on their mortgages than their homes are worth." Add high unemployment (staggering in Martinsville Virginia and Detroit), and no net gain in jobs the past decade, and "Uneasy Feeling" seems very much understated.
We face major crises that we - all of us collectively - are failing to sufficiently address.
Herbert offers some cogent criticism, which I will repeat. But even his language is insufficiently forceful enough to address the current situation.
Let me offer a few more snippets and facts from Herbert that caught my attention.
Middle-class families in 2008 actually earned less, adjusted for inflation, than they did in 1999.
Small children over the holidays were asking Santa Claus to bring mommy or daddy a job.
One in eight Americans, and one in four children, are on food stamps. Some six million Americans. . . have said that food stamps were their only income.
We need to create more than 10 million new jobs just to get us back to where we were when the recession began in December 2007.
Herbert argues that we need to think big. He talks about green jobs, transportation, manufacturing, and more. There is nothing he mentions that has not been discussed, often intensively, here and in the media. He rightly points out that for all the efforts so far what is coming out of Congress with respect to health care is "a bloated, Rube Goldberg legislative mess that protects the insurance and drug industries and does not rein in runaway health care costs." He reminds us we are fighting two wars, allowing us to infer without his stating the opportunity cost for other things we thereby incur.
Herbert argues the focus is jobs, that we cannot heal the economy nor change the current negative environment lest we create millions of jobs: "You can’t have a healthy economy with so many millions of people out of work" is how he puts it.
As a teacher I am glad that he notes our shortsightedness in much of what we are doing when he writes
We keep talking about how essential it is to radically improve public education while, at the same time, we’re closing libraries and firing teachers by the tens of thousands for economic reasons.
And I would agree that there is a collective fault, that "The president, the Congress, the news media and the public are all to blame" because we are NOT talking about share sacrifice, we allow discussion to fragment on taxes or deficits separately without seeing how these - and other things - are intimately and intricately interconnected.
What we lack is systems thinking. What we lack, and what Herbert addresses in part, is the willingness to thinkn boldly and about the kinds of radical changes that are necessary.
Herbert says that voters were primed for radical change at the start of the Obama administration. Many wrote about how this election had the possibilities of paralleling that of 1932. We have increasingly heard the expression "The Great Recession" to parallel "The Great Depression" that begin 7 decades ago.
I would argue that Herbert misinterprets the meaning of the election for most voters. Yes, a clear majority voted for Obama and for Democrats, and it is fair to say that many have been disappointed on a number of issues - ending Iraq, closing Gitmo, quickly addressing health care, turning the economy around. But Obama did NOT run on a program of radical change, and thus did not bring in with him majorities in either the House or the Senate committed to such sweeping changes as those Herbert and many others believe are necessary. Many voted for Obama for other reasons: they rejected the legacy of Bush, Obama was an historic figure, he represented hope and inspiration, they felt that he understood their needs.
It is not that I disagree with the need for radical change. I do not yet think the American people are prepared for such change. We have not yet learned to think systematically enough to realize how interconnected our problems are, how we cannot simply pull one thread without risking collapse of the entire garment of economy and society.
And we truly lack any sense of shared responsibility and/or collective sacrifice.
During the Reagan administration, Fritz Hollings tried to remind people of the idea of shared sacrifice, and argued for budget freeze. That connected with large numbers of people who had memories or knowledge of what had been necessary to survive the Depression and led to Hollings deciding to run )not very effectively) for president in the 1984 cycle. I was part of that campaign, having been drawn to Hollings by the idea of sharing the sacrifice necessary to turn our nation around. Perhaps a budget freeze was not the best way of achieving such turn-around even in the Reagan administration, although it was a far better approach than the one taken by that administration.
Unless and until we can accept - even actively embrace - the idea of shared sacrifice and collective responsibility, unless and until we understand that we cannot hold on to some things we value in isolation from those we know have to change, we will not be able to make the kinds of changes we need to survive as a liberal democracy.
Many have remarked on our increasing economic inequity. That is accompanied by similar increases in social equity, in the ability to move from one economic status to another. We also see the impact in the increasing political inequity, where the voices of some interests representing relatively small minorities outweigh the collective voices - and needs - of the rest of us.
Bob Herbert has An Uneasy Feeling. I have grave concerns that the time to fix things is slipping away. I acknowledge the current political realities that seem to make radical change impossible right now. I see little effort to alter those political "realities" to be able to address the realities of the multiple crises we face.
Multiple crises - no, let me rephrase that. One major Gordian Knot of a problem that cannot be unwound, but can only be cleaved by radical action, different ways of thinking.
A president with the capability of inspiring needs to have the courage to move us to an entirely different way of doing things. We have changed, but only incrementally, and the times require more.
Let me be clear. Obama as president is a vast improvement over what we had with Bush, or what we would have had with McCain.
We need more. And it is incumbent upon us all - voters, politicians, business leaders, teachers, students, media, military, retired folks, EVERYONE - to remember that as a candidate this President spoke about our working TOGETHER - we cannot leave the responsibility to those in elective and appointive offices. It is the responsibility of all of us. We must remind one another.
An Uneasy Feeling - if we do not insist on our collectively doing more, such a feeling might seem like paradise compared to what we might be experiencing in the not so distant future.
That's what's on my mind as I read Herbert. What's on yours?
Peace.