Giving Thanks 2010

In these days of endless drumbeats of gloom ’n doom, it can seem a fertile time for bountiful pessimism. But as this year’s Thanksgiving holiday comes to a close, perhaps we need to counterbalance that pessimism by focusing on a broader view of our current state of things.

Our biggest shortcoming is that around 9½% of our working population is not working. But 91.5% are working, even if some of them are not in jobs of their ideal preference. That is nine people of potential help to every one unemployed individual. How do we bring that potential support network to bear?

Most small businesspeople are struggling. But most big corporate/multi-national businesses are enjoying record profits. A significant portion of that profit is coming from international business, not domestic. Yet corporate CEOs complain that they cannot hire because of supposed “future business uncertainty” out of Washington rather than admitting that they are doing just fine, thank you very much, with higher productivity and more work from the employees they have already. Executive pay continues to grow comfortably; middle-class employee income has been stagnant for years. How can that profitability be spread around among those who are truly generating it – or need a new opportunity?

1½ years ago, our American-iconic automobile industry was verging on collapse. Decades of incompetency, can’t-do and non-competitive / non-innovative thinking had finally caught up to them. Today, in spite of all the rhetoric of a “government takeover,” the industry is plunging forward, creating the cars they said for years couldn’t be made, competing successfully on quality, all under long-awaited new leadership. Left alone, supposed free-enterprise capitalists almost caused 2 million industry and affiliated jobs to be lost; a supposedly “socialist” government intervention restored capitalism to a nearly dying industry. Who woulda thunk?

Two years ago John McCain “suspended” his presidential campaign (for about 3 days!) to race back to Washington to “help save our economy from collapse” at the hands of the financial / banking industry. As it turned out, McCain had no ideas to offer, and went back to campaigning. Talk of a full-scale depression with 20+% unemployment filled the airwaves. Economic indicators were all in the negative. It was a truly frightening time, with no parallel experience in the lifetimes of all Americans born after 1940. Today all these discussions have magically disappeared. Now we spend our time instead arguing about how we did/did not accomplish this return to stability, and talking endlessly while avoiding the hard steps needed to prevent a future recurrence of this catastrophic greed. But now there is no economic depression scenarios backdropping our conversations. I may not like that a “too big to fail” strategy let a lot of guilty financiers off the hook without impact on their personal finances. But I will accept that Grapes of Wrath – The Sequel has so far not had to be written.

Credit card and other consumer debt has thankfully continued to fall as people restructure their finances to something more viable. Selling one’s home takes longer than in memory, but prices are no longer continuing to drop significantly. Many home mortgages are still in jeopardy, but hundreds of thousands have been redone by the FDIC to prevent foreclosure. The shameful tragedy is that commercial banks did not follow the FDIC’s lead, even thought they could have – which had they done so would have actually improved their income statements instead of depressing their profits through foreclosures. Short-term thinking one again trumped long-term investment and the public good.

Yes, we still have our problems, issues to resolve, hurdles to overcome. And there are many different voices pitching many different proposals for “next steps.” Far too many of these ideas are ill-thought and/or self-serving for personal benefit. But somewhere in that cacophony of hollering are the thoughtful, innovative, free-thinking and substantive ideas that have the potential to lead us all to a collective better place. But those beneficial ideas need nurturing to survive, grow, and stand out from the meaningless noise. That nurturing includes our willingness to listen and discern carefully; to think unselfishly in favor of a greater good; to take a step or two backward in order to advance two or more steps forward; to be willing to live and work differently from before if we want things to be different; to separate out true thinkers and leaders from the hucksters who want our votes and/or money for their own reward.

Coming back from this deep a hole, while fighting political battles instead of creating economic solutions, with unpunished guilty persons preventing future course corrections, was never going to be quick or easy. Our short-term impatience is quite unrealistic (and immature), however justifiably frustrated we may often become. But Americans are bright and creative people – we have not yet lost that national characteristic. We are a pretty resilient people, and after a grief period we typically go about what needs to be done – and get it done. And when we have come together to act collectively in the same direction, we typically have come out of our adversity stronger than ever.

So that is our focus for this Thanksgiving. In the midst of our struggle, we have endured far worse. We have stabilized the patient, and have moved out of ER and into intensive care; almost every indicator is moving in the right direction. Progress has been achieved; more progress is on the radar. For those bright candles within the large darkness, we do give thanks. And give ourselves an interim pat on the tush.