The United States is going through rough times. Its financial woes from an overheated economy that shifted enough of its resources from real values to imagined ones are now bringing back a harsh reality to Americans. Senior citizens, or those soon to become so, are seeing their life savings contract, many of which are losing half of their value, as a consequence for the unmitigated greed and deception of big players. Banks and investment houses lost the patience of going through natural progression and hyped business until derivatives outpaced tangible values. Collapse hangs by a thread called bailout.
President Brack Obama's fortunes have been shaken because of his aggressive and expensive stimulus program and support for giant AIG. The problems of a decade of irresponsible financial management by high rollers now demand solution from a panicking population, and a panicking world besides. In two months, Obama is expected to take the United States out of a deep pit to a clear direction of recovery. He cannot do that, there is no quick fix to a debacle. America simply has to go through a crisis, even perhaps a catharsis. It is a period of lesson-learning, and pain is a necessary medium which will drive those lessons home.
But Obama will try. He is the president, after all, and on his shoulders are perched the cumulative accomplishments and failures of a whole nation - just as George W. Bush was shocked by 9/11 to confront a national crisis. If Obama will insist on change, then the drama will even be more intense, because fresh approaches to an atmosphere of fear are almost impossible. In fear, people look to the familiar. And Mr. Change is trying to give Americans precisely that — security from the familiar by not allowing business giants to fall. It is very risky, just more familiar.
If America will not change, then it cannot avoid a collapse that it has never experienced or imagined before. It had allowed false values to supplant real ones. It had allowed imagination driven by ambition and a hunger for windfalls to override good old hard work and visible, touchable and retainable assets and measurable growth. This is a deadly sin and natural justice demands a natural penalty. Obama wants to head off payment time. How can he do that? It is not in avoidance that the guilty learn the necessary lessons. It is recognition, admission, and the long climb back that are the answers, no less.
But America is not totally guilty. There are many sectors of American society that did not allow themselves to see bubbles and live in them. There are those who kept their lives comfortable but simple. They stayed close to the ground, never experienced the high of artificial economic drugs, but now cannot fall to a ground where they are already standing on. And there is that great market of the population called the young. Most of them never got to play and will experience only peripheral fear and consequence. It is the young and what they represent that Obama should rest his case, and vision, on. It is the young, their dynamism and idealism that will build the new America.
As I traveled around the United States three times since the actual, admitted fall of the American economy last October, I have seen the depression and resentment of many in the older generation. I have seen the American media become both guru and rabble-rouser, especially since elections happened and a new administration, inheriting a mess, attracts so much speculation. I have seen how a country built on aspiration and an I-can-do-it attitude quiver in insecurity and pessimism. It is now largely an America in poverty that has lost its greatest strengths: hope and courage.
The recovery of America is not a dream. It will happen. It had too many medals of valor in every field of human endeavor, and it has the vast resources of a large chunk of the planet to cushion even a great fall. The pain will be felt because false values affect real ones, but the real ones are very much around — they just lost the appreciation of their owners. For as long as fear and resentment hold the day, America will writhe in pain and recrimination. But America must understand that its recovery is not a journey to a past that cannot be reclaimed, only to a new path to another Renaissance.
My optimism, if one can call it that, rests on my observation of young Americans. Because my advocacy work in Gawad Kalinga and participation in initiatives to promote good citizenship, I have been taking a close look at the evolution of the spirit that drives the young here and the young at home. I see many similarities, enough to conclude that there is a generational pattern emerging from many countries, especially the more developed ones.
Even as the young feel the aftershocks of the earthquake that shakes the generation of their parents and grandparent, they are now cowed by it. Truly, the young do not bow their heads in submission. Instead, they wrack their brains for options and end up creating their own opportunities if none are opened to them. The pattern of change, indeed, is second nature to the young, just as instinctive as the pattern of growth.
America would be wise to lean on the young, not only to be productive in their own creative way, but also to provide the hope and courage which were severely disturbed by the current crisis. It is the spirit of the young who remain undaunted by a future that is less secure by the terms of their elders but, therefore, more welcoming of their intervention. If there is any single program that can lift the American spirit and economy with it, Obama must allow, or rather, push the young to lead the way.
I can only say the same thing to Filipinos in America, to the generation that pulled themselves by their bootstraps, coming to America with a few dollars and a suitcase, the classic immigrant description, and now cannot be recognized with their nice homes and cars and children graduated from college. Success is not something one holds on to. It is like any solid asset that simply has to be enjoyed and kept warm for the next generation, and for the motherland Filipinos wish to give back to.
* * *
Responses may be sent to jlmglimpses@gmail.com
