It's not the stuff of which dreams are made.

Instead of celebrating bonuses this Christmas season, too many American workers are looking with dread toward 2008, worried about their rising levels of debt, or whether they will be able to hang on to a job with few or no benefits or how to tell their kids that they won't be able to help with the cost of college.

These words precede those I use for my title.  They appear at the end.  And near the beginning we read that

Bloomberg News tells us that the top securities firms are handing out nearly $38 billion in seasonal bonuses, the highest total ever.

Christmastime is bonus time on Wall Street, and the Gucci set has been blessed with another record harvest.

Not for the first time, Herbert's column is inspired by a conversation with Andy Stern, who this time informed him about a survey done by Lake Research on behalf of "Change to Win," the labor federation of which Stern's SEIU is a major part.  The survey

found that only 16 percent of respondents believed that their children's generation would be better off financially than their own. While some respondents believed that the next generation would fare roughly the same as this one, nearly 50 percent held the exceedingly gloomy view that today's children would be "worse off" when the time comes for them to enter the world of work and raise their own families.

The rich, boosted by the not-so-invisible hand of the corporate ideologues in government, have done astonishingly well in recent decades, while the rest of the population has tended to tread water economically, or drown.

Those who have read Krugman or listened to Webb or to John Edwards will not be surprised by what Herbert offers in this column.   We know that what increase there has been in family income is a result of people working longer hours or multiple jobs, and of more earners in the family.  Much of the growth in the economy has been from consumer spending fueled by increasing debt, whether by borrowing on the now-vanishing equity in homes or by maxing out credit cards.  And increasingly two things are happening. First, more and more people are treading water or worse in their personal financial situations.  And fewer people have hopes of having their children better off financially than they were.

I sm 62.  I have lived through this change.  My father was one of six children of an immigrant tailor who lived in upstate New York.  All six graduated from college, five from Cornell.  Two earned doctorates and he reached ABD before going off to make more money than he was as an academic.  My cousins, my sister and I never wanted materially, nor did we need heavy financial aid in order to attend college, even though many of us went to prestigious and expensive private colleges, like Amherst or in my case Haverford.  And yet none of us live any better than did our parents and some live at a far lower scale.  Oh, we all have cars and televisions, and we are able to afford to pay the bank for our houses, but those houses are, despite the growth of the average American home, not as spacious nor in as prestigious neighborhoods as those in which we were raised.  We probably managed to stay even.  We had more benefits as children than did our parents, but as adults we never quite reached their economic level - we were not as high up the economic pyramid as they were able to achieve.  And for those who have children (which is everyone except me)?  Only my eldest cousin could afford to send her two kids to college without extensive financial aid, and that is an effect o her husband owning with his brothers is own import business.  

But my anecdotal evidence is not the basis upon which to draw major conclusions about our economic future.  I offer it only as a subtext, as background material to explain in part why reading things like Herbert's piece - and Krugman's book - has the effect upon me that it does.  The background is part of it.

So are the lives of the students I teach.  Many do not apply to colleges to which they could get admitted because they worry about the burden of debt.  They fight to get into U of Maryland College Park where the costs are cheaper, where perhaps they can live at home and commute.  Yes, it is true that in many cases they have far more 'stuff" than their parents did growing up:  their Nintendos and Gameboys, the cellphones and I-pods. And I realize that the emphasis on consumerism is in fact part of why the economic future does not seem as encouraging.  One reason our parents were able to provide for our futures is that, having in many cases lived through hard times during the Great Depression, they were sure to plan economically for the future, to ensure that they had the resources necessary to tide them and theirs over the next rough patch.

That is certainly part of it.  Perhaps part of the blame falls upon each of us, insofar as we become involved in unnecessary consumerism.  

But it is also quite true that the nature of employment has changed. How many now work for one company for their entire working lives?  Is it possible to be an ordinary worker and provide a middle-class lifestyle for one's family?  What about the safety nets that unionized jobs and defined benefit pensions used to provide?  And as the cost of medical care goes up, the increasing difficulty of having adequate insurance often means that many families are but one illness or accident away from financial disaster, from which due to bankruptcy "reform" there is now often no possibility of escaping permanent impoverishment.

It is interesting that two prominent columnists for The New York Times are focusing on the issues about which John Edwards has now been warning for years.  Edwards has talked about two Americas, Jim Webb talked about three.  For me it is far scarier -  it is the loss of the ideal of America.

The loss of the ideal.  The ideal that said if you worked hard and played by the rules you could do okay for yourself and your family.  The ideal which taught us  that the rights of the individual would not be trampled upon by the government.   The ideal that told us that we were all equal before the law and the government.  

I see what has been happening economically as but one facet of the much larger problem which I encounter every day in teaching about government.  It is a subject about which I find myself thinking far too much.  It fuels my fear that we are sliding away from liberal democracy, from a society in which because of hope most (if not enough) could feel optimistic, have hope for the future.

Increasingly our society has become one based on punitive measures.  Bankruptcy reform is one example.  The world's highest rate of incarceration is another.  A lifetime ban from certain government benefits because of one juvenile conviction for a drug offense also illustrates this destructive mentality.  A government increasingly distant from our ability to influence it, even if we do as we were taught and exercise our franchise to vote for people whose tenure in office is supposed to make a difference.

The column by Herbert uses the word "nightmare" in its title.  With ordinary nightmares one can awaken and thus end the nightmare.   But a nightmare when not asleep seems a situation without escape, and thus without hope.  For too many in America that is becoming their reality.   If they have no hope, why should they participate politically, if they do not believe it will make a difference to their lives and to the future of their children?  And if they do not participate, how can the downward spiral upon which we are now embarked be broken?

A downward spiral - loss of liberty, loss of hope, increasing economic and political disparity.   It may not have to formally meet definitions of fascism nor lose the surface trappings of democracy, but it will if it has not already cease to be a liberal democracy in which people can hope for better days.  

I did not grow up in perfect times.  There was racial discrimination, including in many unions.   Women were not treated equally either in the workplace or in many cases before the law.   But we believed we could change things for the better.  And despite the metaphysical fear of a nuclear war with the USSR, we believed we could exercise our political rights to make the changes we thought necessary, and we could make our government responsive to the needs we believed needed to be addressed.  

And now?   Far too many of my students are at best cynical, or worse, don't even think it worth the effort to try to make a difference for anyone except themselves.  This is despite the fact that they are by nature very generous, as I can see in their interactions with one another.  

So far they have not lost all their optimism.  Which means we still have an opportunity of getting them involved and trying to make a difference.  So far it is more the adults who have begun to give up hope.  

Clearly by our participation here, even if fueled at times by rage and cynicism and anger, we still believe we can make a difference.  But if we do not see positive change?  If we continue to see the hopes for which we struggled mightily politically smashed by the destructive and non-responsive actions of our political leadership?

I'm scared for the future.  I am not so scared that I will cease my efforts.  But I must acknowledge that it is in part my great fear that fuels my efforts.

Politics and economics are intimately intertwined.   So one paragraph from Herbert is especially appropriate to the reflections I find myself making:

When such an overwhelming portion of the economic benefits are skewed toward a tiny portion of the population - as has happened in the U.S. over the past few decades - it's impossible for the society as a whole not to suffer.

Our society is suffering, and if we do not address the economic inequity, we will continue to see a parallel increase in political inequity.  And when that inequity reaches some level, people begin to give up hope for a better future, that they can make a meaningful difference, first for the society as a whole, then eventually even for their own kith and kin.  

It's not the stuff of which dreams are made.   It is a Nightmare Before Christmas.  

Are we going to continue to sleep through this nightmare?  Or is it now becoming inescapable?

Peace.

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