Lord of All Hopefulness

I can vividly remember wondering about 10 years ago when I was still in high school whether my generation would have any big challenges to face. It was a naive thought, but perhaps an understandable one for a young, white American growing up in the suburbs and living at the tail-end of the dot-com boom. The Cold War was over, we were at peace, we were making millions of dollars investing in all these incredibly exciting and innovative companies that were doing all of these really cool things, or so it seemed from watching the newsmedia. We had come a long way on Civil Rights, not far enough, but far enough that it didn't seem as potent a force for social change as it once was. From my vantage point, limited as it was, it seemed the long periods of tumult and conflict and fear and the death of thousands of young men in battles far overseas and social upheaval and economic collapse and privation that had so epically defined the generations of my parents and their parents were not likely to similarly define my future.

But then in my last quarter of college at Ohio State I took a graduate-level seminar on the history of modern American political economy and my eyes were opened. I was given a preview of what is happening now in America with our economic malaise, with the slow-motion destruction of the middle-class, with the disintegration of the rust-belt and the once vital now crumbling manufacturing communities that defined it. All these acute problems now before us are the results of decades of decisions that have eroded the social compact that the political and economic elites once had with the American middle class.

Both Black and White working class Americans used to be able to leave high school and go work hard in a factory and still be able to own a home, a car, and provide for a family. Things were that way for a short amount of time, but it became in Post World Way II America a powerful symbol of the success of the American system. The knowledge in the security afforded by hard work was the backbone of American confidence and sense of self-worth. In America you could be anything if you worked hard for it, or at least that was the myth.

But already even then, even when factory jobs provided entry into the middle class for millions of Americans forces were already at work that would break that compact and its been broken ever since. Now we're just paying the full price for it.

When we helped set up the World Bank, when we helped rebuild Europe under the Marshall Plan, when we began to re-knit the world's economy back together after World War II we were doing it because it would benefit us enormously, but of course one of the unintended consequences of that was that the world got a lot richer too, and we lost our relative economic position. A lot of people act like it's some kind of recent phenomenon that American workers have to compete with the rest of the world's workers. But this has been true for a long time now. American workers have been losing going on 60 years now, and they're not going to make it back up anytime soon. We've failed to ensure for a long time now that our education system was providing for young Americans the skills they need to succeed in the world we helped to make so much more competitive. As a result of that and the decline of unions and the explosion in corporate compensation we've seen real wages stagnate since the Johnson administration for almost everyone except the very rich. We had been using debt for a long time to make up that difference and now we 300,000,000 Americans owe something like $13 trillion in private debt, more by the way than we owe in public debt.

And yet our politics is so corrupted and so cynical at the moment that it can't produce any actions that might actually help grow the economy back out of the massive hole it's fallen into, let alone begin to start helping the middle class to crawl its way back. And so I posted the video above of my favorite hymn because no matter what you believe in, we all need hope at a time like this.