WESTMINSTER — One recent day, I came home from work, worn out and broke as usual. As soon as I entered the house, I could tell something was wrong, a foreboding hung in the spring air.
“What's going on?” I chirped with all the forced optimism of a seasoned classroom teacher.
“Daddy,” my 8-year-old daughter, Lucy, said, turning toward me with grim determination. “Promise me you won't kill yourself.”
(What the … ?)
This request took me completely by surprise.
“Lucy, don't be silly,” I said.
“Dad, just promise me,” she demanded.
“What is she talking about?” I asked, turning to her mother, who stared at me with the same grim determination.
“We need to talk,” Kathy said.
She took me outside and explained that the father of one of Lucy's classmates had killed himself, and the school had taken the time to talk to the students, as this young boy would be returning the next day.
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Although at the time I dismissed Lucy's request as the outlandish demands of a bossy 8-year-old, I must confess the topic shook me.
I'm turning 46 this June, and over the past four years, I have had to watch my life change in the most fundamental ways.
Struggling to find a stable job, tearing through our retirement, wages being garnished by Vermont Student Usury Corporation, it has become increasingly difficult to see any future for me or my children.
But suicide?
Sure, it would erase my student loans, and the life insurance would radically raise my household's standard of living for a time.
According to a recent Newsweek cover story, “The Suicide Epidemic” by Tony Dokoupil, the Centers for Disease Control is tracking a 50-percent increase in the suicide rate for men ages 45-64 over the past decade.
Dokoupil suggests that the record-shattering 40,000 suicides projected for this year will surpass traffic fatalities, and the 400,000 self-inflicted deaths of the last decade surpasses the total fatalities from World War II and the Korean Conflict combined.
Include with this trend the measly 10-percent success rate of attempted suicide, and the numbers become even more stark.
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This piece declares, however, that this drastic increase is in no way related to the economic collapse that resulted from the blatant embezzlement by the reptilian greedheads in the finance industry.
Well, Mr. Dokoupil, I think you got this one wrong.
While he cites that only 25 percent of the increase in suicide is directly correlated to joblessness, I believe the jobless are not the only ones who have been stripped of their hope in this “Great Recession.”
In my mind, that father's story illustrates starkly how we have stripped our culture of almost every trace of human decency.
In the spring, this father of my daughter's classmate actually described his difficulty when picking up his child from our house.
He had worked in his field for more than a decade, only to find himself jobless at age 35.
To support his wife and child, he had applied for any and every job. But as we all know, every employer with a job opening in this country is inundated with hundreds of applications.
And why hire a middle-aged dude with child-care responsibilities when you could hire one of the 17 percent of those bright and optimistic millennials who are unemployed? Not only are they younger, more energetic, and more attractive, they don't have any experience, so they won't have opinions. Jeepers, at 17 percent unemployment, they can't afford to have any opinions - period. Right?
This father described how he'd been traveling to Burlington looking for work and finding the same situation. When you look for jobs in Vermont, there are pages and pages of jobs in Chittenden County, but there are just as many attractive young people who can walk to the interview.
So we are pitted against one another in an epic struggle for few opportunities.
Not only does this struggle increase the desperation for those of us in the middle of our lives looking for work, but it also puts pressure on the fortunate people who have jobs.
We are constantly reminded of this vast sea of superfluous people who would gladly replace us. Remember, the recovery from the “dot-com bubble” recession at the turn of the century was also a “jobless recovery,” so this pressure has been building for more than a decade.
In the end, he was unable to face the desperation of unemployment and financial hopelessness with a cheerful smile and a positive attitude. He was a hard-working man and by many accounts a deeply generous friend and a loving father.
In this highly competitive economy, we have no room for humanity, no time for a learning curve, no room for the slightest mistake.
* * *
To me, it feels like an outright war on the worker. We are all independent contractors fighting against one another, and any slight imperfection renders us useless, even superfluous.
More and more, in a winner-take-all-society, we are a society of losers on a continuum of winners and losers. On the one end, you get that hotshot in the sports car, with the computer built into her glasses. On the other end, we have the guy living under a bridge, sharpening a screwdriver so no one will steal his glasses.
Remember Occupy Wall Street, the notion of the 1 percent? Richard D. Wolff, professor of economics emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, highlights data that suggests that, in fact, 1 percent of the population in this country controls 43 percent of the wealth.
Even more striking is that 93 percent of the accumulated wealth of our country is controlled by 20 percent of the people. Two people out of ten control almost all the benefits of our collective economy.
It is only natural for those winners to assume their victory is a reflection of their merit. The rest of us get to fight tooth and nail for the scraps that fall from their tables, and we're told that we all deserve what we get because of our personal flaws and shortcomings.
I send out resume after resume and never hear anything back. Meanwhile, the perpetrators of the real-estate collapse got their six-figure bonuses, and we taxpayers are forced borrow trillions of dollars collectively to prop up the finance industry to preserve all of our individual debts.
According to The New Yorker's James Surowiecki, corporate taxes on profit have fallen from more than 50 percent in the 1950s to less than 20 percent today. We cut as many public employees as we can, maintain hiring freezes at private companies, always demanding higher productivity - all just to sustain these record profits and new highs each day on Wall Street.
* * *
We are so pitted against one another, we are losing our capacity to feel empathy. Shame on us. Shame on all of us.
We are so busy trying to protect our own little slices of heaven that we can't be bothered with the lives of the people fighting at the bottom of the trickle.
Newsweek is wrong. It is about economics. We are, most of us, part of a ballooning economic underclass.
In memory of this boy's father and his survivors, I implore each of us to take stock in who we want to be as a society.
We are not unimportant. We are not superfluous. Without all of us working and consuming, there would be no record profit, no interest payments, no need for a financial industry. How long will we continue this perverted fantasy of a free market?
So my answer to Lucy's request, “Daddy, please don't kill yourself” is not necessarily what she wants to hear.
Perhaps I could promise something more like this:
“Lucy, I promise to do whatever I have to do to make sure you have the opportunities you deserve, but at this point, I have no idea what that will mean.
“Whatever I do, though, I promise: I love you, and I don't ever want to be a burden on you.”