The New Conversation in America

Yesterday's New York Times had a distressing article on the front page entitled "Forced Down the Job Ladder, From Executive Pay to Hourly Wage."

It gives several examples of people who up until a short while ago held down executive jobs and, after being laid off, have had to settle for positions as hourly workers.  One is a man who had worked many years, working himself up to $70,000 a year as the security manager for a Fortune 500 company, overseeing a budget of $1.2 million.  He is now a janitor. Another is a woman with twenty years experience who after being let go from her $165,000 job as Vice President of brand development at a video production company, started two different businesses that she closed down due to the bad economy.  Now she is doing data entry for between $10 and $15 per hour, depending on where she gets work.

What do you suppose the conversation is like at the home of these and other people whose sense of themselves, according to the article, has changed drastically because of their changed financial circumstances?  In my last blog post, we talked of the need to have grownup conversations in these times.  The need to face facts and then take action.

I'm sure the people who are the subjects of yesterday's New York Times article are finding this hard to do.  From my experience, there is no other country on this planet where one's worth is more tied to "what one does."  Worth equals work.  But should it?  And what happens when the work stops for reasons beyond the control of the individual who is suddenly jobless?

Thomas Paine in writing The Crisis said, "These are the times that try mens' souls."  He was talking of the pre-revolutionary period when it was highly uncertain what would become of this experiment of America.  He took it upon himself the communicate the ideas of the highly risky revolution to common farmers as well as to intellectuals.  He did it by stirring their hearts as well as their minds.  He helped create the conversation that had to take place--and be repeated and repeated, then reconfigured and recast as new possibilities and challenges presented themselves--in order to unite the fledgling republic's people as one to face their challenges.

Sounds familiar, huh?  We're asking President Obama to be both the author of revolutionary thinking as well as the leader who will put it into action. 

Wherever you are, and whatever work you do, make sure you are in the conversation.  Not just to protect your job, but to envision the new role you can and should play in this new scenario, this post-Bush era of democracy. 

Whatever you do, keep talking.  Just like these people in the New York Times article who refuse to be bowed by their new circumstances, who have not lost hope that things will get better.  For the first time in a long time, I believe that Americans have come to believe we are all in this together.  And the solution requires that we all get involved. And keep talking.  And listening.