{"version":1,"type":"rich","provider_name":"Libsyn","provider_url":"https:\/\/www.libsyn.com","height":90,"width":600,"title":"Our 200th Episode","description":"Robert Reich wrote on his substack for September 16, One study found that half of Americans expect a second civil war to happen \u201cin the next few years,\u201d even if the specifics vary according to one\u2019s politics and imagination. On the other hand, unlike the Civil War of 1861-1865, no particular issue \u2014 like slavery back then \u2014 pulls the nation apart. While immigration, crime, abortion, and LGBTQ+ rights are controversial, none of these seem to elicit the anger and passions that might generate civil war. Nor are we enduring an economic calamity, pandemic, world war, or other national cataclysm that might force Americans to take sides. While we are not experiencing a singular polarizing issue like Slavery, and though we can\u2019t point to a singular economic calamity that brought this on, it is in fact  decades of economic factors and now a looming economic disaster that has put us here.  We\u2019ve managed to create an economy over a half century that excludes, then isolates individuals by limiting access to everything from communications to housing, your home sitting at the apex of human need. Socially we tell the newly minted abandoned economic nomads that it\u2019s their fault.  Our systems and our leaders constantly remind them in a myriad of ways that they don\u2019t have what it takes to \u2018make it\u2019. Then we forget these individuals unless or until they commit a mass shooting, or we find them dead of an overdose behind the Walgreens. Maybe just maybe they are thought of by elected officials from time to time when their votes are needed.    My thoughts on our society have been shaped in part by my experiences as a youngster with poverty.  My young life started stable and solidly middle class then descended, through family circumstance, into the grips of poverty. Don\u2019t get me wrong, I have countless fond memories from my upbringing. Here though, I\u2019d rather for a moment focus on our experiences that represent the other side of growing up in America. Growing up poor in America. A friend once recounted the quote, \u2018the only thing worse than a country full of have-nots is a country full of used-to-haves\u2019. We are a country massed with people who know what they are missing. For decades, some of us were building a society based on creativity, positive energy, robust education\u2026\u2026 for some of us while for others,  we\u2019ve built a society where resentment, economic fear, shame for your economic status; we took this underbelly of societal cancer and metastasized it. We\u2019ve turned grief into grievance. We\u2019ve given nearly all the worst in each and every one of us a voice and put it to work in the service of accelerating the downward spiral that enriches an ever smaller number of our neighbors.  I am the product of the 1980\u2019s.  My life has occurred during the dismantling of the New Deal.  I\u2019m also proud of my family\u2019s immigrant heritage.  I believe in the countless individual stories that make up the story of North America.  That tell us the story of the American Experiment.  The community in central Massachusetts where I grew up was no stranger to global changes in the economy, albeit being in the northeast meant we were spared the very worst of de-industrialization until well into the early aughts.   Our family suffered a divorce, not an affliction caused by economics but one that significantly altered the economic trajectory of our little family.  What\u2019s so striking to me to this day, is the dichotomy between those that were always there to help, with those community members who suddenly discovered, to my little mind, that we had committed a grave transgression.  Did they think we\u2019d give them the flu?  Was it something Mom said? Do I have something on my shirt?  You see it when people look just above your head into the distance when you approach.  You begin to understand that some people still have what you once had and they might even be taking it for granted.   People stopped talking to us at church. The farther we got away from affluence, the further folks seemed to get away from us.  I was learning a seminal point that we don\u2019t like to tell ourselves about ourselves.  For all that Americans can be wonderfully gracious when called upon, there are just as many of us who long ago gave into the desire of self-preservation by blaming others when those others need help. By keeping a distance from the affliction of poverty.  Maybe just maybe by doing so, we won\u2019t get any on us.  Except the churning economic deprivation knows no boundaries.  Doesn\u2019t stop for anything.  Denying our systems have been kicking people to the side of the road, while kicking the Spector of debt, failed systems and social ills down the road, has left us in grave peril. Frank Zappa said, \u2018The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater\u2019. I fear that the show is about to be over.  _________   History.  It\u2019s what keeps me getting up every morning. It\u2019s what keeps me trying with all my might to build more housing, to build new companies and to write like this.  We\u2019ve been here before.  This isn\u2019t our first Gilded Age.  We\u2019ve lived with the presence of Jim Crow and widespread open bigotry and classism; tools used to split the populace to the benefit of the elite. The Klan marched 30K plus in Washington, DC in 1923.  They also tried to march on my very hometown in 1924, immigrants including some family members stopped them in their tracks at the town border.  People get pissed, it turns out, when they know what they\u2019re missing.  If you think you can write, then write.  If you can organize, then organize.  Reach out to just one person, commiserate, and grow your group from there.  There is strength in numbers.  When you see an injustice, you really should call it out.  Remember the Zappa quote?  Demand a refund on your ticket. Demand a free and fair election. Demand a more inclusive economy.  Participate in solutions.  Create the right, instead of avenging the wrong.  Most importantly, Love one another. ","author_name":"Are We Here Yet Podcast","author_url":"http:\/\/arewehereyetpodcast.libsyn.com\/website","html":"