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I PREFER WE DON’T RETURN TO NORMAL (HOW SOON WE FORGET)
(Written 2 October 2001; posted 3 October 2001)

       I think I speak for most when I say that September was an especially bad month. The quiet optimism that I had at the beginning of the month has been replaced by pessimism and despair.
       For me, things started to sour before September 11. The events of that day compounded my problems.
       When you run a small business, cash flow becomes very crucial. Every client is royalty, and a client’s timely paying of invoices means the difference between paying and not paying “extravagances” like car payments, insurance, the mortgage, and utility bills. My month quickly soured when I discovered, through a third party, that one of my clients took ill. Suddenly, things that looked certain were no more. Projects that would last through the end of the year were suddenly put on indefinite hold. The problem with this is that a project on hold yields no billable hours, and a lack of billable hours yields a lack of money. Suddenly, within less than a week, I went from a decent amount of billable hours to virtually none, and from an adequate income to virtually none.
       Of course, within of week of this problem came September 11. For those of you not in business, let me say that American commerce came to an abrupt halt on September 11. Because of the tragedy, the business of business did not seem very important, and business was put aside for a week. Business has begun its slow recovery, but it will be years, if ever, before the economy is the same as it was before September 11. The rules have changed.
       The interruption to the economy has had a profound effect on just about every American. Major projects once viewed to be of great importance have been put on indefinite hold; in light of the new paradigms of life in the United States, they just aren’t that important anymore. Of course, the effect of this holding pattern is a significant scrambling of those businesses and organizations relaying on the income from those now-postponed projects. As days turn into weeks, and weeks into months, the domino effect of the day the economy halted will continue to expand into everybody’s lives -- everybody, with maybe the exception of a hermit living in North Dakota or some other similar foreboding place, will know at least one person who lost a job or whose life was otherwise affected by the events of September 11. Like it or not, we are all shipmates. We are all interconnected somehow.
       Some businesses, however, are proceeding as if nothing ever happened. Because of a chain of events that I had absolutely no control of, I am not getting paid. Of course, given that the markets crashed after their resumption, I can understand that businesses and individuals that invested in the markets now suddenly find themselves cash strapped, their worth much less than it was prior to September 11. (I have also felt the pinch as well in my own investments.) However, the banks and credit card companies apparently do not. They did not miss a beat. Who cares if the nation’s lives have been turned upside down; who cares if you find yourself suddenly without an income due to circumstances beyond your control; either pay us our money, or else.
       This is what normalcy was before September 11: arrogant, unsympathetic, uncaring. If this is what the Usurper in the White House wants this country to return to, then let me off the train. I do not want things to go back to the way they were. The one memory we should always treasure about that fateful day is how total strangers in a city that has been characterized as the epitome of callousness and aloofness were willing to sacrifice their lives for other total strangers, no questions asked, and with no ulterior motive. On September 11, America rediscovered compassion. Suddenly, life became important again. We all cried together. We all got angry together. We all grieved together. For a moment, every human being in this nation realized that a human life is the most valuable thing of all. America shined.
       But the shine is fast becoming tarnished. In our haste to accept the Selectident’s battle cry to “return to normalcy”, we have cast off our compassion, our humanity like so much garbage. To return to the heartless, greedy, and uncaring America of September 10 makes a mockery of the tragedy. How many people who have been forever affected by this tragedy will be hounded by creditors and threatened with dispossession despite the fact that they are unable to pay due to a set of circumstances completely beyond their control? “I’m sorry, Mr. Smith, that the airline you worked for is now out-of-business and you are out of a job, but if you don’t make your mortgage payment, we will be forced to evict you and the family.”
       My beloved grandmother told me many stories of the Great Depression and the widespread poverty and misery of that era, and the heartlessness of the rich to the poor. (Unemployment and drought did not stop the banks from foreclosing; thus the mass migration from the Plains states to California.) My mother’s parents were so poor during the Great Depression that her father walked several miles to his job at the auto assembly plant (and it gets really cold in Michigan in the winter) because they could not afford to buy the product that he was making (ironic, isn’t it?). My father’s parents were so poor that they had a two-bedroom homestead (with nine children) sans indoor plumbing. Read the Grapes of Wrath, and what makes the tale so chilling is that people actually were forced to live the way that Tom, Rose of Sharon, and the rest of the clan were forced to live. Is it no wonder that communism reached its zenith during this time? If the Depression showed us anything, it was that capitalism does have a serious flaw, in that it removes humanity from a place of importance.
       The Depression scarred my beloved grandmother the rest of her life. The lack of compassion showed by the affluent (who tended to be Republican) to the poor instilled in her a great loathing of anything or anybody Republican. She saw humanity and compassion trampled upon on a massive scale.
       I am afraid. I am afraid we are entering into another period like the Great Depression. The events of September 11 have sent severe shock waves throughout the economy. Because of it, tens of thousands of people are on the verge of financial collapse. Let us not go back to “normal”. Let us remember those who died by helping the living, by honoring humanity, by exulting life. It is our duty. As a great man once said, “It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that we here resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain.”