It’s said that one of the characteristics of a good story is to tell it backwards.
You know… this happened because this happened, which happened because this happened. A well-told story starts out with a step, and then ends in a flood. Real or proverbial.
We are in a flood. We are in a climactic moment of momentous tragedy that keeps washing over us, threatening to wipe our individual and collective stories off the map.
And I find myself more and more counting the catechism of how we got here.
How did we get to religious fanatics and would-be Gatsby’s on the Supreme Court, willfully misinterpreting the will of Congress, and taking on the role of lawmakers?
How did we get a bunch of Ivy League justices who bask in the largesse of ultra-rich patrons dictating that racism doesn’t exist?
How did we get to Cassie Goldstein, watching her mother go down as they were running from the shooter in Highland Park almost exactly a year ago, seeing her chest had exploded, knowing she was dead, and saying, “I love you, but I have to keep going”?
How did we get to 10-year-olds, their classmates and teachers dying around them, calling 911 in Uvalde Texas and being ignored?
How did we get to my daughters - all of our daughters - not having the luxury of denying that there are men in power who think their bodies are nothing more than vessels, to be raped and planted with seed?
We can go back to the late 1970s when Evangelical Christians, angry about school desegregation, threw a political gauntlet and, according to historian Randall Balmer, used Roe v Wade as an excuse, “because the anti-abortion crusade was more palatable” than admitting they were driven by racism.
We could go back to the 1980s, when Reagan broke the air traffic controllers’ union, signaling that people were just cogs in a machine geared toward making money for owners, not caring about workers. Union membership has plummeted since then. Income inequality has soared.
We can go back to the 1990s, when the Clinton Administration decided that they would compromise on a CEO pay bill that would have capped corporate deductions at $1 million a year. As Elle Griffin from the Elysian explains:
This meant that if a company wanted to pay a CEO $2 million, it would have to justify to its shareholders why this person was worth taking more money out of their pockets.
Instead, the Clinton Administration kept the $1 million cap in SALARY deduction, but allowed much more in stock options. So, corporations just started paying CEOs in stock options. Which made CEOs pay more attention to the price of their stock than to investing in their companies. Which led to vulture capitalists taking over retail businesses and newspapers and squeezing them for profit rather than investing in them - and their employees - for the future. Which left people who worked in these companies feeling unseen, unappreciated. Abandoned. Even if their company didn’t get taken over and sold off piece by piece.
Remember, the 2009 movie, “Up in the Air” was a comedy. It’s about a guy who is hired by vulture capitalists to fly around the country and fire people. But it wants us to see his humanity as he falls in love with someone who turns out to be even more ruthless.
Firing people was the basis for a Hollywood fucking comedy.
The point is, this cut-throat economics - engineered by the guys who went to the Ivy League schools with our current Supreme Court Justices, and who have about as much insight into the average American as they do - devastated entire towns, entire communities, entire families, entire people.
In 2017, Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton published findings on the increase in the mortality rate among white people - particularly white men who didn’t go to college. The increased mortality was caused by suicide, drug use and alcoholic liver disease. They termed these “deaths of despair.”
But this is the thing about statistical studies - they tell you what already happened. The decline had started in 2009, though Case and Deaton note that there were signs of it happening much earlier.
Hmm… 2009… wonder what was going on in the country… Oh! Right! The guys who went to school with our current Supreme Court Justices - who, at the time, were even in President Obama’s cabinet - had engineered a way to bundle pieces of mortgages into new “financial instruments” that - due to lack of oversight - ended up being worthless, and the resulting stock market crash sent the unemployment rate skyrocketing to 10 percent. In some states, it was as high as 12 percent.
That’s about 20 million people who - due to the arrogance of men who went to the same universities and law schools as our Supreme Court Justices - were deprived of work, salary and dignity.
That’s 20 million families - many of whom were already reeling from the shutdown of the companies they worked for in the 1980s, and 1990s.
That’s thousands of towns that suddenly lost a good chunk of their tax base, and subsequently couldn’t provide adequate services. Like lead-free water.
That’s tens of millions of people who were set up as perfect patsies for the Sackler family to buy off FDA regulators and institute cut-throat sales practices that gave lavish rewards to the sales reps who killed the most people.
Of course, that’s not how they worded it. That death part about pumping OxyContin into communities suffering from despair was something the Sacklers didn’t want to think about. But, ultimately, that’s exactly what happened.
This all left us ripe for a demagogue to come in, declare, “I alone can fix it,” and set us on a course for the demise of democracy.
The people who didn’t feel seen, who felt abandoned by their employers and their government, who weren’t even on Tim Geithner or Larry Summers’ radar in 2009… they responded to a man who told them the truth about their lives - that they bad been screwed.
Not enough has been made about the fact that the government response to the 2008 financial crisis and the 2020 pandemic were polar opposites. But it’s worth noting. In 2009, once credit markets were stabilized, the emphasis was on creating a financial recovery package that favored big banks over people - and a bailout package that Christina Romer - chair of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors - argued was too small to make a difference.
In 2020, every person over 18 in the country got $1,200 checks. Every person under 18 got $600 checks. For the first round. Then there were two other rounds.
That money helped people who had been laid off feel less scared as we tried to figure out how to be safe, and how long the pandemic would last. It helped people who didn’t lose their jobs spend, and therefore stimulate the economy - replacing their cars, and buying homes with enough room for an office.
This government help didn’t make us lazy, it made us feel seen. It made us feel that our lives were valued by our leaders.
I think that’s why this week of devastating SCOTUS rulings has been so hard. SCOTUS is making crystal clear that they don’t see us. They don’t understand us. They control our bodies and our ability to get education. They control our economic circumstances. And they don’t even know who we are.
Everything I’ve read is about what SCOTUS is doing in a legal sense - taking the creation of laws into their own hands, trampling over the notion of stare decisis that they all swore in their confirmation hearings was sacred.
I don’t read about how much these decisions harm people who already feel scared and abandoned.
Just like people felt when the factory that supported most of their town shut down.
Just like they felt when they lost their houses in the aftermath of 2008, because the programs Congress created to help regular people were administered by banks, not government agencies.
Which is why it was important that President Biden responded to this week’s rulings on affirmative action and student loans by saying, “We will find a way to do this.”
He is being practical, but he is also giving people something they desperately need. Hope.
How many journalists will report on hope, rather than discord?
Lack of hope, and the anger that generated, is what got us to this place. It started with Reagan, who privileged the monied advantage of the people at the top, rather than the hopes and dreams and hard work of people on the bottom.
It has snowballed to where we are now. Constructive hope - not cynicism - will help us start a new story that we can happily tell our children and grandchildren. A story about how an entire country’s mindset was turned around as it peered over the edge of the end of its founding ideals.
This is what we need to do. Start at the beginning. Don’t lose sight of where the story is going. Keep moving forward.
And start telling stories of hope.