Resilience

Resilience.  The word that stayed with me, resonating from the speech in the high school auditorium, delivered today by the esteemed president of MIT, President Hockfield.  It was part of her answer to a student’s questions about what it takes to be successful at MIT. "You cannot be afraid to put yourself to the test, not afraid to fail," she says. " And to do this, you must be resilient."

How absolutely simple, clear, obvious. How could I have forgotten?

It takes someone trained as a biologist, with a passion for the creative work in the laboratory, with a commitment to science and technology education, to help me see what I should have known all along.  In the past months since J lost his job I have been so focused on the problem of our economic deficit that I had stopped focusing on this most fundamental element of our solution.

 As I sit in this auditorium my personal and professional world collide.  I am here today as part of my work as a school psychologist in the Oakland schools.  But several months ago I was listening to this same woman speaking at the parent’s weekend in an auditorium at MIT. It was before the election.  I was still doubtful about Obama’s chances of getting elected and was terrified about what would happen if he weren’t. Even though J had not yet lost his job   I knew that our country had lost its way and was in deep financial trouble. But here at MIT it felt as if there was no problem too big to solve.  Every one was hard at work in that hands-on roll up the sleeves get in the lab and stay up all night if you have to we will find a solution sort of way.  And all I could feel was hope.

I am sitting now in the auditorium at this school where I work, thinking of my daughter who is across the country in Cambridge.  Thinking about all she had to struggle with over the years, with a mother who worked full time and kids who mercilessly teased her because of for her love of numbers,  who a year ago found acceptance letter after acceptance letter coming in from colleges around the country, rewarding her for her commiment to math, science and engineering.   She should never feel guilty that in the end she chose this school that she had so long dreamed of attending. 

I am thinking too about the work I have done as a school psychologist with inner city children, with special needs children, with children born in poverty, scarred by loss, subjected to multiple traumas.  Time and again I had witnessed this miraculous force we called resiliency allow some to thrive despite these challenges.  It is the same force obvious after natural disasters, after the firestorms and floods, when the plants come back more vigorous than before.

And now Obama is making it happen in our country, in this   new era in which as President Hockfield puts it “being smart is being way cool.”  Where science can be restored again to its rightful place.  Where innovation is indeed our most reliable way out of this most serious global economic crisis.  I soak in her worlds as the life sustaining force I have so longed for in if  this parched land I have experienced in  California.  Our failures will teach us.  Our persistence will pay off.  We will heal our people. We will save our planet by discovering  new technologies. We will dare to dream again.  

 

 

financial aid: Confidential

Supplemental information  to the profile:

There are some additional facts that you should know.

Perhaps I did not make this  clear enough  when we requested  mid semester emergency financial aid and were granted none.

I am currently the sole employed parent.  My job  as a school psychologist does not pay much more than the cost of MIT tuition and room and board.

My daughter's step-father lost his job in November. My daughter's father lost his job in January,  however, even before this he was unable to contribute much financially.  

For a number of years  I was the sole support of my two children. 

When I remarried my husband sold his house,  took this money and set up a college fund for my children. He earned a middle class income  in a job  that had no pension,  so he had to set aside money for retirement.  Now he has no job, his 401k has lost at least half its value, and he has had to go back to school to get retrained. 

Must we use up all the cash he had saved before any financial aid becomes available for my daughter? 

Would we have more chances of getting support if we got divorced?

My  daughter is not a minority student, but she did overcome her own disabilities.  

She worked very hard in her studies and held a job in order to make this dream of attending MIT come true.

I am very proud of her  and the contributions she wants to make towards  bettering the world by doing fuel cell research as a chemical engineer. 

I am willing to make whatever sacrifice I need  so that she can have this education.

Still,  I wonder if this school is really for  middle class families like ours.

 Or did we do something wrong when we filled out the forms?

Tomorrow the president of your college will be at the high school where I working. She will be speaking to  the success of this "inner city" school at getting so many students into MIT, speaking of the need to train students who are not afraid of numbers, not afraid of new ideas, who are our hope for " the innovation based economy" that will solve the problems we are facing now.

It will not be possible for me to talk to her about our situation, as I am just an employee, not a parent at this school. But if I could I would ask, is there something wrong with this picture, that I who have worked so hard, devoted so much of my life to helping others in this and other schools, now find myself hanging so precariously on a financial precipice as I try to fund my own daughter's education? 

I would also tell her that financial aid or not,  debt or not, I cannot imagine a better education, a more exciting place. Considering the real cost and future value of an MIT education, it is a bargain.  

As I write my blog, my daughter writes hers about this first year experience she is having, being in what she calls the happiest place on earth. It is  happiest because she is fully immersed in learning about  what she loves. That is what truly matters. Whatever the cost, it has to work out.

 

Disaster Planning

Disaster preparedness is on my mind.

 Just completed CORE III, the city of Oakland fire departments training so that I will know what to do as a responder in the inevitable course of what we will experience here in the wake of an earthquake.

 Still thinking about what happened after Katrina, reading Breach of Faith by Jed Horne, subtitled the Near Death of a Great American City.

 Thinking about all of this now in light of our economic quake, with shock after shock of a magnitude not experienced before.  As a man made perfect storm, with it’s churning vortex of wind and water, its floodwaters breaking, sweeps away homes and jobs.

 Last night I listened to Obama addressing the congress in Washington DC: We love this country too much to see it die. Fearlessly he seeks to inspire. Even in the most trying of times we are not quitters. We are equal to the task before us.

For myself I prepare for the worst and vow to write every day. Because it is the only way I can restore that mounting deficit of trust I do not want to leave my children.

 I write even when I am exhausted from working because it is the only defense I have that will turn disaster into something that feels like labor, the kind that comes with contractions, birth pains that you must take breaths to get through, pains that have a purpose because you know something really wonderful is coming, something that will change your life forever.

 Swept into those creative energies we American’s are known for, I write,  determined to save this beautiful world of ours.  

 

 

the things we do that make our children proud of us

Tonight I am watching the Oscars.

There in the front row, flanked by her two daughters,

sits the  ever wise and glowing  Meryl Streep

who is  not above dancing and singing in middle age abandon 

not above embarassing herself.

Close by her, Melissa Leo, with all her wrinkles,

is up for an academy award for Frozen River

and still another bespectacled star,  Richard Jenkins, who played professor turned african drummer  in The Visitor  with  " acting  born of that ease that only experience can bring."

Stop! did I hear that right?

Can this really be happening in Hollywood?

Those who are acting and  parenting and  working 

with  experience have become my stars:

 I admit it.  I want to be like them.

Everyone who wins  the oscar and has a child

 tells them that it is for them, this honor, it is all for them.

Because parents do everything for their  children.

Really.

We want to  make our children proud of us.

But here's the secret:

it's not winning the oscar that will really make our children proud, 

 its not the  fancy evening gown and jewels we wear,

 not the   trust fund we leave them.

It is about the love and about the work 

and about the experience we have learned from both,

what we believe in and pass on, 

with  joy and passion, 

and for me right now it  looks like  this group of five  

electric guitar playing rock n roll singing baby boomer

empty nesting couples  all with two daughters, just like  Meryl Streep 

once a month, we get together and  belt out songs

 like our life depended on it,  dance like we're on a greek island,

all  us who came of age marching in war protests and labor movements

working on a kipputzes, living in communal houses,

growing organic gardens, learning how to  meditate

all of us who never gave up hope that change would come

 still singing songs like:

Which Side are you on

We Can work it out

Union Maid

Solidarity Forever

Taking Care of Business

She Works hard for the Money

We laugh about how we could put it on u-tube and embarras ourselves

or not.

What matters is that 

we  make our children proud

just as my daughter tells me she feels when she passes on 

my blog to all her friends

we pass on what we  have learned:

 how we  walk in the right direction, 

towards our north stars and even when we get off track

how we  find our way back to being radiant again

HELP WANTED: Teaching EXperience

Can’t figure out what this world is coming to when at the same time we are socializing the banking industry we are allowing education to become privatized.

 What’s this about?

 We are turning the lives of children into something that can be a money making venture while banks are  given billions of dollars  by the government because they could not make money.

 Does that mean that we didn’t do a good enough job educating our bankers?

 Something is deeply wrong with this picture. 

 Did you know that in New Orleans all the teachers were laid off after  Katrina?  Now it is reconfigured system of privatized schools and privatized teacher recruitment and training.

 Can’t figure out how these can really be  called  schools, when  almost all of the teachers are fresh minted college grads taking a break before their real  careers start.

 Every year the private venture of education is training  and retraining new teachers, and kids with post traumatic stress disorder are teaching  their  teachers .

 In New Orleans I hear that a  training was provided on "identifying and managing trauma"  however not a single teacher returned for the second year so there was no one who could identify anything.

 No one remembers the student who  lost a mother, a father, a sister, a house, no one remembers the beautiful poem they wrote about their loss, or the fact that they had succeeded in learning to read.  There are no teachers  to come back to visit next year to tell about the award they won.

 I read on a blog that teachers in a school in New Orleans were told to let the student's behavior spiral out of control  so they could be expelled rather than be treated/  In Oakland kids who go to “charter schools”  and act out, or have learning problems. are told they can’t  stay .  They come back into the public schools where every student must be served.  More and  more classes are  filled with students with special needs.  

http://blog.nola.com/graphics/2009/02/RSDTEACHERS021509.pdf

HELP NEEDED: 

Let unemployment be a lesson for us. Let the failed banks be a lesson for us. We need  teachers who really know how to teach so we can have jobs again.

 

 

 

Staging Recovery

 Voice 1:

"Somewhere off in the distance it sounded like an explosion, then  rushing water. It was dark for a very long time before we saw just pinpricks of light, out there in the darkness the people who had come home."

I am listening to the voice of the 55 year old man who spends his day sitting beside the dead bayou because he lost everything his parents had left him in the Lower 9^th Ward.

"If things are going to be bad," he says," if it’s going to be an economic crisis, I want to be home…but where do you go if there’s no home to go? When I saw there was nothing to do, no way I could save my house, I just cried like a baby.  We waited for our district representative to show up at the neighborhood meeting and she never came.  We found out she was off shopping, couldn't even give an hour to  come to listen to us."

Voice 2:

A lone gull cry.  The long mournful sound of a horn playing the blues.

Voice 3:

I am listening, standing in middle of Royal and Toulouse Street at dusk, as two heart balloons float off in the sky . A woman sings What a Wonderful World as if she is performing to a crowd of thousands, with her transcendent powerful voice and a hat out in front of her.

Voice 4:

 President Roosevelt, during the Depression said, “This is a time when we realize we are all interconnected.”

Voice 5:

Mack at the Lower North Ward Village is talking about the nonprofit community center he started last year. He says, "I never thought that this would be the most fulfilling year of my life. We have to start caring about each other. Start asking how is our neighborhood doing. Look around and ask, where is my neighbor, why didn't he come home? Unless we do --people go missing."

Voice 6:

David, the young man who has joined the efforts to bring others back home, is standing in front of MLK Middle School where the sign reads “Welcome to the first day of class, August 18^th, 2005,” frozen just as it was that day of the evacuation.  Third story windows are propped open. David is talking about how they won’t let anyone come back into the building, even though there is very little evidence of damage.  He tells us there are no schools left here anymore.

I am wondering what happened to the records of all the students' work. I am wondering how can families come back to live here without schools.

Voice 7:

The voice of the governor of California on the news again, telling us there is still no budget settlement, and  he  will cut 20,000 state worker jobs  if he has to, to get a balanced budget. He will  have to close the schools, we will have to stop state services. 

Imagine:

On the stage there are all these young people in sleeping bags, all of them get up and sit at one big table to eat, and then go off to work with paintbrushes and hammers.There is a room of computers, ready to be set up by  computer engineers and used by the young and old in this community.  There are experienced teachers arriving with   boxes of books, eager to share their knowledge with kids who are starving to learn in a school that serves real food.  

Voice 8:

Sylvester Frances, founder of the Backstreet Cultural Center, tell us about how it was, here in this sanctuary of beaded Indian costumes and feathers, 5o people all sleeping here on the floor because it was the only place with electricity. How those months after Katrina were some the best times of his life because everyone came together in gratitude after the tragedy.

 Image:

The parades start and everyone is dancing in the streets. Young and old, black and white. When the music starts playing, it is hard to think about anything else.

How do we rebuild our community, our schools, our houses, how to we work,  when the biggest tragedy of our time strikes, when everything we care about gets washed away ?

We start listening.

Brenda Veland writes:Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. When we are listened to it creates and makes us unfold and expand.

 Image:

This is the world, a creative explosion, right here on these living streets of New Orleans,  in these living voices  of people who have nothing else to do but start over  in the wake of a man made disaster.

 Everywhere I am listening and learning.

 

Money and Its Management

I was dreading our meeting with your financial planner, Larry. 

After all, I had not been opening  the 401K statements for the past six months because I didn’t want to know just how much we had lost.

Our “nest egg” for retirement,  the money set aside to pay for college tuition, the money we had faithfully been  withdrawing from our pay checks every month, all of this had taken a huge battering.  All this on top of J’s job loss and the  sudden stopping  of all contributions to our 401Ks.

 I had been fretting over the numerous mistakes we had made. Why hadn’t we done as some of our friends who after they had inherited money or sold a house had just  left their money sitting  in  a CD’s while they were waiting to figure out what to do next and had  not been  impacted by these losses... Or others who had seen it coming, and had taken out of their money from the  stock market before this latest unprecedented collapse?

 I was no longer  sure where to direct my anger. At the boss who had laid off my husband, or the CEO of this corporation, or at the mortgage industry and all the bad loans that had been made and sold, or at the hedge fund managers and their crazy gambling or the banks managers who were compensated even as their business failed with yearly salaries that were ten times more than what we would make in a life time. 

Or should I be mad at our financial planner who did not advise us to  pull all our money out of stock before they fell?

 I was mad at all of them.  We  had been the responsible ones, the ones who knew we would need to save in order to retire. The ones who  had  faithfully been paying off our home loan, not borrowed from our house, not taken lines of credit,  not run up credit card debt.  We had carefully drawn up a plan  with  the services of a financial planner  and what came of it?  Wouldn’t we have been better off not paying that  percent for Larry to manage our money only to  see so much of it lost like this?

But there he was, the real man, starting right into  his presentation by putting in front of us reams and reams of papers covered with numbers. This was our life.  I might as well have been looking at a foreign language. It was so different from the words I’d been writing about in this blog. But in it’s way it was actually weirdly comforting.

 This  gray haired, balding man, his desk  cluttered  with binders, his walls covered with old diplomas,  educating us about  the last 80 years of the market, what it had taught us, as if he were  someone who had seen it all  and knew  what had happened,  how the bursting of the housing bubble was one thing but no one had predicted the credit market crashing as it did, the major institutions all falling at once.

I heard him saying the words I thought about every night:We don’t yet know where the bottom is  but it’s going to get worse, and the market may go down even further before it stabilizes.   There will be more blood  letting.

 And somehow even these words were comforting, because there was someone else talking to me about IT: this biggest fear of mine.

 The comfort flooded me finally. I was in a conversation that could help me.

 You must keep perspective, keep level headed, look at what’s in front of you. There will be  more deflation, and then, massive inflation. So put on the seat belt, buckle in, hunker down, get your values straight, hang in there and support your family. Do what makes sense so you can feel good about what you are doing.

I sit back and breath, realizing  that we are no longer just talking about J and me, about a job or no job, but about planning, about stabilizing,  about our  kids, and  our future. 

This was reality therapy, money therapy. Something all of us needed right now. A sobering, clear headed talk about figures and planning.

 Larry was saying:  It is  not how much you make but how much you don’t lose in bad markets.

He was  talking  about  the wisdom one  gains from experience, and finally I realized why I am feeling more comfortable.   We want  this in our advisors.

 Larry puts it this way.  In this profession gray hair and no hair are a good thing because you know you are with someone  you has seen it all before and knows that  there is no short cut. 

So here it is, the story I have been telling, about why it’s important to turn to those who have experience   and learn these lessons.  We will survive the bi-polar cycles of the market , and find our way to back to doing the right  thing.

 Numbers are  numbers.  We can’t argue with them. It helps when there is someone who can explain them in a way that  actually makes sense.  In the midst of all this upheaval we are going through,  someone who helps us  feel that in the end it must all mean something.

 

 

the two americas

Odd how it seems these days there are two Americas:one made up of those who are still working, or who are not working by choice of retirement, wealth, or support of  disability checks; and those who have been laid off, recently or not so recently, those looking for jobs and those who   gave up looking for a job despite their desire for one.

What seems to me to mark a  recession from a depression right now  is the  loss of a job that is necessary for survival. 

So many of us who did not inherit money or were never able to save much or who did save but who lost much of it in the  stock market,  live pay check to pay check.  So when the pay check ends everything changes.

Some people are lucky ones. They  have a spouse with a paycheck and medical insurance, albeit a spouse who experiences increasing stress from the situation that confronts their partner and their family. Others are now in the worse case scenario mode:  single, or without a working partner, who have run out of time, unable to get a lead for a job, not sure how to cover health insurance premiums,  talking about returning to live with elderly parents.  

I am in the category of the supporting role spouse, who lives straddling the two Americas. I have yet to find the support group I  need because  I am too busy working, and also because I chose to put my remaining time into writing this blog.

In my other America- where it appears that nothing at all has yet changed in the world--I note that  the topic of job loss almost  never comes up. No one ever made that  much money to begin with , and it getting along still just fine with what they have. They don't want to think right now about the economic crisis.

When I come home, it is to another America,  where our conversation returns over and over to the bigger and smaller picture of our economy.

So who reads my blog? And who chose not to read, even when I invite them into this dialogue?

There are those like my in-laws, whom I have encouraged directly to read out of solidarity to my husband but still chose not to do so, perhaps  because they resent being asked, resent having to  think about such a changed world they have not yet experienced themselves, and still do not completely believe us,  think we may  be exaggerating the truth about this turn of fate. 

Then there are others like my husband's former boss (now searching for work) who not only reads but shares with me so many of his own experiences that I have expanded my perception to include his vision of things.  He makes me think about how in the east coast there may be  a more "profound respect for elders." He shares with me inspiring stories about   role models like his doctor father and others who were able to "keep their youthful vitality while growing in wisdom. " He calls an old professor of his  a "poster child for this....participating in dance contests with students for fun, while nurturing students and his own mind with intellectual discource built up through 50 plus years of experience."  I am invigorated by the time he takes to share his thoughtful responses to my blog. I long for more such  intellectual exchanges, and more wisdom from experience.  

There are others that I know are reading the blog, those who have signed up as followers, and in so doing have let me know they are there, or read without signing up perhaps out of a desire to remain anonymous,   but who nonetheless respond in other ways. I am grateful for all of their presence in our life, in this virtual community.

And there are  many others I believe who may not yet be ready to read what I have written. Perhaps because they still operate in shame. Some may be ashamed  that they have a job and others do not and they are not sure they want to hear about this, or to acknowledge that gap between the haves and have nots. Others may be  ashamed out of   humiliation the loss of a job triggers, hurt by the blows to their self esteem that this crisis has  brought, scared into silence despite the  invitations from many sources for them to tell their stories.

What I want to share now is there is one thing I have learned since I have started daily on writing this blog, which was by no coincidence  the day before Obama's  inauguration.  The biggest change that has happened in my life with his presidency coming concurrently with this economic crisis is that I no longer feel afraid to speak out with honesty-  identifying myself and what I think and feel, and believing that in doing this I can make some small difference.

I hope you will feel the same and be part of this dialogue about change.

safety net

I am thinking about safety nets

and their absence: what happens in my tight rope

walk  if I fall, every one depending on me

right now the only one with a job:

I am afraid  to look

down, so I keep taking one step after another

one day at a time, not  thinking

about it anymore than that, 

but history keeps knocking 

 with all the stories I was raised on: 

 daughter of  a Depression survivor

father who always feared the bottom falling out

even with all the benefits of world war II

the  GI bill and an education

even though he was one of the lucky ones

who never lost a job

retired with a pension

so far from where we've come

now, where what he feared most may be

true and he's   holding on 

 to everything that  he worked so hard to make 

so he won't become the 90 year old

who had to find a job as a greet in a grocery store

because he's already lost so much 

all while I am  standing there, swaying

 in the middle of the rope

the worst place to be 

making a budget

 as if I am already living on food

stamps, trying to figure out

how to buy nothing

so we can pay the next installment

of my daughter's college tuition

and dreaming about the benefits of being at the  bottom 

where there is already a safety net:

 jealous of  those benefits 

of a  handicapped friend who lives

in a subsidized housing unit 

on SSI,  jealous of government subsidy programs

and those who get the full cost of their kids 

college costs covered: how crazy is that:

because if I lose my job, lose my pension, 

lose my health insurance, lose my house

how far would I fall?

that's what it comes to, with all this talk

about how much worse things  can get

yet still, I take the swaying steps 

forward, grateful to work.

Sustainable Living and Community

Last night we celebrated M's 60th birthday with a community gathering in Berkeley.

It started out with a presentation of her new green business venture.

Then we listened to stories of the early decades of her life, while her 80 year old mother sat in the audience and cried with pride at the success of her only child.

Yes. M's life radiated success. Not in that realm of accruing great wealth or fame, but in what comes from the integrated cloth of a life of rich experience. 

We all got on what felt like her story telling bus and  saw  vivid visions of her life unfold.  Together we  became the richer because of her as we travelled to New York City in the 50's and Alabama in the 60's, as we saw the Beatles and the be-in's, saw a child raised by an extended family, with  a mother who was excluded from the PTA because she was divorced but joined her daughter in getting to Paris.

And when we stopped listening and looked around us in the room we saw M's success as the integrated presence of all these people here with us, all of their lives touched in some way by her vibrant vision, all celebrating her, and something greater than her that she had created in this community of hers.

Then the joy exploded. We danced and danced, uninhibited,  this community of hip 20 somethings with elders in walkers, the dance community of hula hoopers, NIA teachers, Trance Dance leaders with business suited partners in green business ventures. The eclectic music spun by M's young DJ friend an eclectic uniter of styles  from  salsa, to trance dance, danceable  jazz, to 70's disco.  

In the end everyone was dancing around a cake with one candle, held up by two people.

M was shimmying under the cake, disappearing into the crowd, reappearing.

As if to say, this evening  was not just about her, although it was  she who brought us here to celebrate something very real: how wonderful the world can be if it looks this way as we age.

Here was M. so beautiful and vibrant at 60, who had held so many jobs, and just recently lost a business she had  lovingly  nurtured along, who had worries aplenty about how to stay afloat, but here she was,  still dancing, still creating  a  vision for another world of work: 

a sustainable world, a world as big as the city we live in, where we all have something important to do with feeding each other, building for each other, conserving our resources, believing in  the world that we almost wiped out  when our own drive for wealth and survival took over.

M has become  my  poster adult and a role model  for this new world where AGE COUNTS and the concept of ageism I have been writing about become obsolete because this way of integration negates such isms. 

HOPE!

Dear Readers,

It is not my intention in writing this blog to spread gloom and despair, or to indulge my own inner demons, although in the process of my writing some of this may emerge.  Please bear with me in this, for if you do, I promise what you will hear is  my true  intention: inspiration, hope and its audacity as our new President calls it.  I am listening very carefully, searching around me and in my heart, to find these voices, and indeed, I find them everywhere, amazingly, audacious as it is  to have hope in such times, it is there.  The more I write the more I feel it is so.

 Please bear with me and read on, because your very act of reading is also hope for me.

Knowing that even one person  is reading these musings of mine takes away that sense of being lost  I  otherwise feel as I move along this unmapped road. It chips away at the separation between us, and makes me understand how important our interconnectedness is at a time like this.  FDR spoke about this during the Depression, saying there was nothing like those hard times to realize these things.  He also spoke those famous words about how there was nothing to fear but fear itself.

How true now. 

Fear itself.

How easy it is to forget this.  There are times that it feels that we are sold fear. Where our fear makes us hide away, attack others, horde what we have.

 There is nothing like fear to ameliorate our ability to act out of kindness.

But in my world right now kindness rules, not fear. I see it in the way my friends gather around us and offer support, and how we support others, trading services when the money for the rent is not there.  I see it in the quickness with which my eye doctor jumps to  provide a free eye exam and glasses to an undocumented student who could not see the board.   

We do not have to ask those at the bottom of the economic food chain to act with kindness for they know from experience how these acts directly impact them.  But as the hurts of our economy rise we begin to learn every day how we must help others.

For those on the top, who have been earning astronomical salaries,  who were not raised with such a perspective, who have no memories of  what a Depression or economic hardship really is, we may need to legislate kindness.  But for the rest of us, there is no need for this.

 It is the air we breath.  It is the north star we follow to guide us through this darkness.

Please stay with me. I am looking every night for it, watching every day. And I will keep writing about what I find.

And I welcome you too to tell me of the hope you find, for there will be days that I will forget,  get lost again, and I will need your to remind me.

The other side of the corporation - part II

There is one type of major US corporation that I have  talked about and that was presented in the  o3 Canadian documentary.     This type of corporation was  clinically diagnosed according to the DSM-IV symptoms of a psychopathic personality disorder, including:

1) a callous disregard for the feeling of other people

2) the incapacity to maintain human relationships

3) deceitfulness (continual lying to deceive for profit)

4)the incapacity to experience guilt

5) the failure to conform to the social norms and respect for the law

It is not that the real individual who make up the corporation actually manifests all these qualities, but that the creation of the corporation itself as an entity becomes something bigger than the people who created it, and its very being is predicated on these antisocial features- that have to do with making money at all costs.  Thus the corporation takes on this Frankenstein like quality.  Moral people start doing things they would never normally do.  

Perhaps this was something my scientist  father who worked in research and development in the rubber industry was talking about more than thirty years ago when the freshly minted MBA's starting taking over the management,but didn't really know anything about the business they were running. Maybe the  financial industry epitomized this as every year  more and more of the best and brightest kids were recruited right out of Stanford and Harvard, promised huge salaries as financial analysts making  nothing. Perhaps this was the picture that shocked a friend of mine when she saw the face of a man on the news who was being charged with criminal acts during the beginning of the financial crisis.  She remembered babysitting for him as a child, his parents were some of the most ethical people she knew.

The real people who are doing the lay offs at  the real companies are something else:

An English man recently told me the story of his layoff after 20 years as a senior engineer for a large manufacturing company.  The manager who laid him off followed him out to his car and was  crying as he drove off. More than his own loss of a job, this man talked about what it felt like for those who were in the role of having to severe so abruptly these real relationships that had been so valued .

I heard this again about the managers in my husbands company.  The CEO of this corporation was a truly caring guy, who would open his heart and cry at meetings, a parent whose daughter just happened to go to college with our daughter.  He ran a company where layoffs had seldom happened before.  And suddenly everything changed.  

I take a walk with my friend every Friday morning and she tells me about running her  company. Not a publically traded corporation  but a substantial special effects film studio with 300 plus employees.   She shoulders the weight.  Lives in  fear about when the next job  is coming in, and the next layoffs she may have to make if it doesn't.  My friend was trained as an artist, raised by socialists and thinks like a business woman.  We have walked together, raised children together, for 21 years.  She never takes lightly her responsibility as an employer, which for her is so much like being a mother, where so many are depending upon her for their livelihood. 

That is the other side of the corporation, the side of  incredibly hard working,  caring and visionary people, people who are raising children, and want those children to have a future,  and that we  must count on so that we will be able  to get back to work again.

To Do's

1.  Make sure to get some exercise everyday no matter what

2.  Look at the sun whenever possible

3. Limit exposure to the news

4. Don't be too proud to accept whatever prayers,  sympathy or gestures of kindness come your way.

5. Keep shopping  locally,  and don't skimp on the food budget- eat organic as long as you can

5. Remember that those who live with NO SAFETY NET have needs that are even greater than yours and keep advocating for them.

6. Encourage everyone you know who still has their salary to go on spending as if the bottom of the world is not going to fall out because if they don't do this it will.

7. Support libraries and education at all levels because it really is our hope for the future: if you live in California call 1 888 268-4334 to lobby that devastating cuts aren't made in these areas.

8. Make up your own version of the news by writing every day and telling the important stories

9. Find or start an organization that will lobby to protect your rights to keep working as you get older and ask your younger colleagues to join you in this as  inevitably they will be getting older too and if they don't help you now, they won't be taken care of either. 

10. Remember that we really have entered a time of new freedom to speak up and hope for a better future so do everything you can to make this a reality.

How Bad Can it Get? The Corporation-Part I

Sometimes the anxiety becomes overwhelming.

Most of all at night, when I'm going to bed, or early in the mornings. That's when the worst case scenarios take on the shape of a ferocious hungry  monster who is eating up all the remaining jobs,  houses,  food, and even my children's education, and making us all starving beggars.

How bad can it get?

We've already lost a large part of our 401K retirement savings, that was in lieu of a pension.

My husband lost his job.

My ex-husband lost his job.

My ex-husband's partner lost her job.

My renter lost her job.

The state of California is in a state of financial crisis as property tax along with house prices plummet and place my job at risk.

We found out last week that MIT will not give us emergency financial aid because our '07 income was too high and first we have to use up all our emergency cash reserves.

And today we find out that my husband was not alone: many of the top engineers and project managers at his major international corporation were laid off too.

The ugliest face of the corporation emerges at these hard times.  While it could afford to keep the older employees around in the flush times it is increasingly apparent that these are indeed the ones to be let go of when the times are tough.  And in many ways this letting go comes to those who can least afford it.  Not like those financial analysts who earned 6 figure salaries and 7 figure bonuses. And not like the young people with their feet just out in the work world, who have so little still to lose. These are people who are stuck in the middle of their middle class lives, with real medical needs, real children to support, real house mortgages to pay, real college tuitions that are due.

So why couldn't the corporation do as some government agencies did: cut back on hours? on salaries?   This is a time of crisis. No time to send people out into the job market that is not working.

I worry now more about the others than about J.  What's happening to my husband's ex-boss's boss, who was laid off a week after J, and whose wife was not working? And what about the  genteel soft spoken senior engineer, an image of what I had thought was the civilized side of this company that unlike the others would retain employees for twenty years?  But it wasn't true. In this economy he got  laid off like all the rest- no regard for his experience, the products he had developed. The money he had made the company.

So the shareholders can see a profit?

Because there really is no more work to be done? No products to be designed?

So someone at the top can get paid more?

Or because at essence the corporation really does have  a psychopathic personality disorder- a total disregard for the human being? That '03 Canadian documentary "The Corporation" got it right.

It's so strange because this is a human made disaster. It is not an act of God, like an earthquake, flood, drought or fire, all of which so easily could hit and destroy California.

Sometimes it's  hard to believe that it is real. But then   it impacts you personally with the loss of a job, and it becomes all too real, how the whole world  is interconnected in this state of a collapsing economy.

But if it's human made, this disaster, than it's fixable, and the fix is up to us.

We must  let go of the  corporation as it let go of those who gave over to it all of their skills honed from  years of education and experience, those who like my husband and his colleagues were making  real products, doing real service, bringing real profits, making the corporation exist.

The corporation is only as strong as those real people who made it, and it has  to return to that human shape and form so it can be held accountable for its actions.

And we must   return  to that sense that we have some control over our lives,  conquer the fears that rule our sleep, and  get on with our lives.