The world is quite sober, indeed. The Dow and the Nasdaq seem to be in a perpetual tumble. The banks are bleeding so much red that the tanker-size help the government is offering is doing no more than simply keep the red from suffocating the entire institution. Then there are the crooks, new ones being named every other day, which is adding a certain biblical feel to this very cold rude wake up to us all.
Our world today feels the way Dorothy must have felt when she ended up in the land of OZ. Many of us are left scratching our heads in wonderment about how our world got so off-kilter. At this point nothing would surprise me. If you were to tell me that New Yorkers would take the streets like our Parisienne counterparts to protest something, well, I would assume such a thing would happen now. Not twelve months ago. But now, anything is possible.
What I see in the faces of strangers on the city streest is: fear. Everyone is anxious. And I mean everyone. From the lowliest to the mighiest, from Flat Bush to Park Avenue, New Yorkers are feeling the ground shifting underneath their feet and not quite sure what to hold on to steady their inbalance. I know our country will turn a corner and that the world will seem a bit more hopeful. This certainty I can believe in, but it’s what the world will look like once we round that corner that makes all of us anxious. The gloom and doom crowd, the same ones who can create or believe in any number of conspiracies, are predicting for a world where the US will be greatly diminshed, New York City no longer the epicenter of finance, and Americans becoming like those pesky Socialist-Scandinavians where everything is nationalized. Oy Vey, is all any of us can say in the face of such calamities.
Our President keeps pressing for a new direction for our country. No one can argue that we’ve strayed miles from the ethos of what made our country great and what lured millions, like my very own parents, to this country’s shores. But how do we get back to the simple, yet incredibly complex morals where neighbors looked out for one another, where people rolled up their sleeves for the greater good of their community, where people were as concerned for people as they were for animals, where people didn’t merely attend weekly religious services, but took to the streets to put into practice the basic tenets of their faith. The cold bucket of reality being doused on our country may be what was needed to refocus our country’s moral code. No longer will financial wizards, the same wizards that have plunged us into this depression, be held up as an example of good, as if money was the true and only measure of a person’s worth.
Whatever the new reality once we wake from this very sobering time is that our world will be different. And it is this uncertainty, more than the gloomy news that gets gloomier by the day, that is witness in the faces of those around me in this very special city.
