Third World America (25 page)

Things finally started to take a turn for the better when Lesa got involved with the Rural Enterprises’ Women’s Business Center in Oklahoma City. “One of the ladies in my peer advisory group leaned over and handed me a business card. ‘Here’s a heck of a client for you,’ she said. It turned out to be the biggest client I have.” Soon after, her former clients began to trickle back. “It took about a year but every client but one has returned.” Lesa credits the Women’s Business Center and the women she met there with helping her keep both her business and her sanity.

Lesa draws inspiration from her mother, who divorced in 1964 with four daughters under the age of seven. “Every day I saw this magnificent woman with a college degree do everything from taking in sewing to working at a canning factory. She used to say: ‘How do you clean up the house? Well, you pick up one thing and put it away. You pick up another thing and put it away. You do that again and again and soon your house is clean.’ The same thing is true in business. We get so scared and we sit there, bummed out. You have to look up and say, even if I do something very, very small, I’m going to keep plugging along and accomplish something today!”

“When you are helping others, you are helping yourself.” It’s amazing, when hearing stories of resilience, how often that sentiment pops up.

It’s an unexpected twist: Taking the one thing you have an abundance of when you are out of work—time—and using it to help others turns out to be remarkably empowering and energizing. Moving beyond a sense of helplessness to make a difference in the lives of others—whether working at a food bank, delivering meals to seniors, or mentoring a child—can transform our experience of even the most stressful times. The consequences of being jobless are not just economic—they’re also psychological. And the psychic toll is greatly lessened by taking a look outside ourselves and finding ways to serve others even less fortunate. It can bring both perspective and meaning to our lives. Plus, evidence shows that when we look outward, reach out, and connect—especially in times of trouble—good things follow.

Take the case of Annette Arca, a Las Vegas commercial real estate professional.
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After she lost her job, she began to spend some of her newfound free time volunteering in her community. Even though she couldn’t afford to make the payments on her town house, she figured there were still people in worse situations who needed help, so she set aside a chunk of hours each week to help deliver lunches to medical centers and work with homeless families. “It’s a great opportunity to get involved, to help other people,” she told the
Las Vegas Review-Journal
. But volunteering also lent Arca a sense of purpose and positive outlook that complemented her job search. “If I’m negative, nothing’s ever going to happen for me,” she said.

Then there’s Seth Reams, who lost his job as a concierge in December 2008.
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He took an energetic approach to his job hunt, circulating his résumé to more than three hundred potential employers. But when he got no bites, Reams told KOMO Newsradio in Seattle, he felt useless, “like I wasn’t a member of society anymore, like I wasn’t contributing to [my] household anymore.” Frustrated, he and his girlfriend, Michelle King, who worked as an assistant administrator analyst at a health insurance company, brainstormed ways for him to stay productive during his job search. Together, they came up with We’ve Got Time to Help, an online platform for locals who have extra time—generally people who were laid off—and want to contribute to the community in Portland, Oregon, where Reams and King live. For the blog’s first project, Reams helped a single pregnant woman, who also cared for her three siblings, move furniture into her home. More projects soon followed: painting a room in a battered-women’s shelter, teaching refugees how to drive, helping a needy family repair the roof on their home.
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Within sixteen months of the site’s launch in January 2009, We’ve Got Time to Help assembled more than a hundred volunteers, who’ve assisted hundreds of struggling locals.

“People call us with tales of hunger, home loss, job loss, personal loss, and myriad difficulties,” Reams and King wrote on their blog in May 2010. “But, most still have hope. Hope that things will change. Hope that times will get better. Hope that their situation will get better. Hope that someone still cares. And if someone calls us that seems to have lost their hope, we do our best to give them a little. We tell them that we will do everything in our power to help them. We will not walk away from them. We will stand by them in their darkest hour.”

“The ultimate measure of a man or woman,” said Martin
Luther King, “is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.”
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After spending months embedded with a thirty-man platoon in Afghanistan’s remote Korengal Valley, Sebastian Junger, who wrote
War
based on the experience, says that he was struck by how, after being put through “the worst experience possible,” soldiers often miss it upon returning home.
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It’s not because they are adrenaline junkies, he says. They are addicted to the brotherly love. “Every guy in that platoon was necessary to everyone else and that necessariness, I think, is actually way more addictive than adrenaline is,” says Junger. “You have an unshakable meaning in a small group that you can’t duplicate in a society.”

We actually
can
duplicate “unshakable meaning” and “necessariness” outside the battlefield. Indeed, we have to. In times of mortal danger, soldiers unconsciously create a sense of purpose and community and kinship. Right now, the perils we are facing here at home are not as tangible and deadly as those faced by our soldiers in Afghanistan. Nobody is shooting at us—and I don’t mean to draw an equivalency to the lethal threats our men and women in uniform are bravely facing every day. But twenty-six million people are unemployed or underemployed, and over 4 percent of U.S. workers have been unemployed for more than six months—nearly twice the percentage it was back in 1983.
^117,
118
Forty-six percent of the unemployed have been out of work for over six months; 23 percent have been unemployed for a year or more.

And more and more people are entering the ranks of “the 99ers”—those who have been unemployed for ninety-nine weeks, after which all unemployment benefits end.
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Since Congress has been unwilling to extend benefits beyond that point, by the end of 2010 over a million people will likely have exhausted all available benefits. Of course, a third of America’s unemployed never receive any financial support when they lose their jobs; they’re ineligible to receive unemployment benefits.
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Making matters worse, there is a growing—and disturbing—trend among some employers: job listings that explicitly ban unemployed workers from applying, with lines like “No unemployed candidates will be considered at all,” “Must be currently employed,” and “Client will not consider/interview anyone NOT currently employed regardless of reason.”
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“In the current economy, where millions of people have lost their jobs through absolutely no fault of their own, I find it beyond unconscionable that any employer would not consider unemployed workers for current job openings,” Judy Conti, federal advocacy coordinator for the National Employment Law Project, told the Huffington Post. “Increasingly, politicians and policy makers are trying to blame the unemployed for their condition, and to see this shameful propaganda trickle down to hiring decisions is truly sad and despicable.”

Make no mistake: Though it’s not war, it is financial warfare—and there’s an enemy out there that does not wish you well. The bad guys are not firing bullets; they are setting financial traps. Foreclosures continue to surge. Health-care costs are going to continue to skyrocket—even for the insured. And long-term unemployment is going to be a fact of life for the foreseeable future.

The consequences can be far-reaching: A study by researchers
at Yale found that “high unemployment rates increase mortality and low unemployment decreases mortality and increases the sense of well being in a community.”
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According to M. Harvey Brenner, one of the study’s authors, economic growth is the single biggest factor in life expectancy. “Employment is the essential element of social status and it establishes a person as a contributing member of society and also has very important implications for self-esteem,” he says. “When that is taken away, people become susceptible to depression, cardiovascular disease, AIDS and many other illnesses that increase mortality.”

So how can we protect ourselves and those close to us? How can we re-create the sense of “unshakable meaning” and “necessariness” Junger describes? How can we create our own bands of brothers—and sisters—in communities all across the country that will give us that sense of purpose and necessariness, and allow us to face down these threats?

The truth is, we are hardwired to seek out unshakable meaning. The longing for necessariness is in our DNA. Fifteen years ago, I wrote a book—
The Fourth Instinct
—about the part of ourselves that compels us all to go beyond our impulses for survival, sex, and power, and drives us to expand the boundaries of our caring beyond our solitary selves to include the world around us: “The call to community is not a hollow protestation of universal brotherhood.
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It is the call of our Fourth Instinct to make another’s pain our own, to expand into our true self through giving. This is not the cold, abstract giving to humanity in general and to no human being in particular. It is concrete, intimate, tangible.”

This is what the soldiers Junger wrote about were missing when they left the battlefield. And we can create it in our own lives … if we choose to. We must, because it’s difficult to face
the perils of our new economic landscape alone. Those of us who are under less of a threat need to reach out to those who have already been ensnared. When soldiers talk about being in a foxhole, it’s always about who they are in the foxhole with—it’s not a place you want to be by yourself. There’s not just strength in numbers—there’s purpose and meaning if we reach out and connect.

As Pablo Neruda said, “To feel the intimacy of brothers is a marvelous thing in life. To feel the love of people whom we love is a fire that feeds our life.
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But to feel the affection that comes from those whom we do not know, from those unknown to us, who are watching over our sleep and solitude, over our dangers and weaknesses—that is something still greater and more beautiful because it widens out the boundaries of our being, and unites all living things.”

From the beginning, America has been dedicated to “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” But the signers of the Declaration of Independence assumed that some truths did not have to be proven; they were, to borrow a phrase, self-evident. It was self-evident, for example, that the happiness that was to be pursued was not the buzz of a shopping spree high. It was the happiness of the book of Proverbs: “Happy is he that has mercy on the poor.”
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It was the happiness that comes from feeling good by doing good.

But, in a spiritual fire sale, too often over the past fifty years, happiness has been reduced to instant gratification. We
search for “happy hours” that leave us stumbling through life; we devour “Happy Meals” that barely nourish the body. We buy into ads that tell us that there is a pill for every ill and that happiness is just a tablet away.

Faced with hard times, more and more Americans are now choosing to redefine the pursuit of happiness in ways much closer to the original Jeffersonian concept. The widening holes in America’s social safety net make a commitment to service even more urgent. We’ve seen the American people rise to the call of service time and again in times of national tragedy—witness the outpouring of money and volunteerism in the wake of disasters such as Hurricane Katrina, the earthquake in Haiti, or the 9/11 attacks. After 9/11, Americans showed they were eager to work for the common good, to be called to that higher purpose. It was the best of times amid the worst of times.

President Obama doesn’t need to convince the American people of the value of service; his challenge is finding a way to direct that national impulse into an ongoing effort to deal with the dark days we find ourselves in. He’s got the right words: “When you serve,” he said during a commencement speech at Notre Dame, “it doesn’t just improve your community, it makes you a part of your community.
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It breaks down walls. It fosters cooperation. And when that happens—when people set aside their differences, even for a moment, to work in common effort toward a common goal; when they struggle together, and sacrifice together, and learn from one another—then all things are possible.”

But it is going to take more than soaring rhetoric. Every president pays lip service to service. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, President Bush declared, “We have much to do, and much to ask of the American people.”
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A month later he
echoed that theme, saying simply: “America is sacrifice.”
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Of course, the sum total of his idea of sacrifice turned out to be shopping, going to Disney World, and offering tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans.
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And President Obama has yet to turn his words into action and follow through on his promise to emulate FDR’s Civilian Conservation Corps, JFK’s Peace Corps, and LBJ’s Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA). The role that service can—and must—play in addressing the urgent needs our country faces is all the more important among the nation’s young people who were so galvanized by the ’08 campaign, but who will now find it increasingly hard to get a job or to afford to stay in school.