The national economic meltdown was brought home to me this week. Uncharacteristically, my local Big Bank put a seven-day hold on a large out-of-state check I wanted to deposit.
Seven business days? Big Bank had never done that to me before. Those bastards. That meant it would be a week and a half before I could use my funds. So in a fit of financially ill-advised pique, I snatched back my check.Then I set off with the goal of finding a Cash America, or a Paycheck America, or wherever it is America goes these days to get a check cashed instantly (for a fee, of course).
As it turns out, none of those places are located near where I live, which is by the beach in Southern California. They are all, shall we say, inland.
I finally located a check cashing place. Inside the sterile-looking, cheerless lobby, the clerks were sequestered behind bulletproof Plexiglass. While I was waiting for my paperwork to be approved, I noticed a small coffee can on the counter. It had a picture of a man and two young girls on it. “Help the Masons”, the can said. “Every penny counts.”
“Who are the Masons?” I asked the clerk.
Mason was their coworker, she explained. He’d been gunned down in the parking lot. Five bullets. Now he was paralyzed from the waist down. He’d been raising those two little girls by himself, and now… her voice trailed off.
“The streets right around here are real bad,” she said, then named four streets, gesturing with her hands. “It’s like a shooting circle. Things are getting worse. Everyone around here’s out of work. Everything’s bad.”
I asked some more questions about Mason. He has no health insurance. Pretty soon, he’ll probably get kicked out of the rehabilitation facility he’s been recovering in. Right now his mother is in town from Wisconsin, looking after the little girls. After that, no one’s sure what will happen.
I shoved five bucks into the donation jar.
As I drove away from the check-cashing store in my “rob me” Z4, I pondered a sense of unease has settled over my hometown of Los Angeles. People are losing their jobs, all over. I read last weekend that the unemployment rate in this city is over ten percent. It seems to be getting worse by the week.
In the immediate wake of hard times like the ones we’re having right now, the circles of violence like the one that swept up Mr. Mason inevitably grow and invade into new territory. There was much wringing of hands in my beach city community recently about a string of robberies that had been committed by perpetrators from–quote–outside the community. In my own postage-stamp-sized town, we’ve started to have home invasion robberies. I used to worry about frat boys stumbling up from the bars on Pier Avenue at 2 a.m. on Saturday night. Now I’m worried about desperados seeking cash.
And violence is only the dark underbelly of the recession/depression/liverwurst, whatever it is we’ve got on our hands. Little stores are closing all around in my community, one after another.
What about you? Where you live, do you see any visible signs of economic hard times? Does it make you nervous? Do the incidents that take place around you impact or inform your writing?
Tough break for the Mason’s, and hard to handle sometimes for those of us still standing.
As a youth minister and when I was an EMT I often found it hard not to give away everything to help folks I ran into. If it weren’t for my own family I probably would have. We need to always be sure to teach the young in our families to give whenever and whatever they can to help their neighbors.
You never know when its going to come back around to you.
Like Jesus said:
“Do to other people what you want them to do to you.”
That is so sad, this economic meltdown is dreadful, really dreadful
Ali
Sobering, reality check. I hope the bottom is not to far down so we can see some upward movement.
I know Joe – the news last night was grim indeed with world markets in freefall, with AIG etc.
I too hope that we can see ourselves rise out of this terrible period. The Chinese have a proverb that acts as a warning –
“May you live in interesting times”
And we certainly do
Ali
I know how you feel, Basil–I wanted to go find those Mason girls! Ali, Joe, I think I heard it expressed well by some talking head this morning that people are in a “state of mourning” right now for the good times that are gone. They’re in shock and denial about it, and unsure of what to do about it. So for now, the government is doing what it has always done–try to spend its way out of the crisis. But since that is what got us all INTO the crisis–overspending and borrowing on every level, both personal, corporate and government–this is supposed to work?
Since I’m in the Detroit area, I see it all the time. I was at the gym yesterday and I talked to a guy who I knew was in the cement business. I asked him how it was going. He shook his head and said, “I’m not in that business any more. I got laid off last year. Got another job, got laid off from that. Got another job and got laid off from that in December.”
(And to make matters probably even scarier, his wife works for General Motors).
I figure that’s about all we really need to know about what the economy’s like for a lot of people.
Three times in a year? Wow. What’s that saying, Terry? “A recession is when your neighbor loses his job. A depression is when you lose YOUR job.”
We live just near a piano studio where a boy was paralyzed when a stray bullet from a nearly robbery ricocheted and hit him while he was in piano class – and that was in the good part of town… You see the impact of the downturn everywhere – lets hope we’ll soon see the light at the end of a tunnel…
Oh my God, while he was in pianoclass? That’s awful, Clare. And things like that are happening every day.
In Oakland it happens multiple times a day…
I worked for a suburban Pittsburgh police dept. for ten years, so I know that crime is everywhere. Even areas that seem relatively safe really aren’t.
With the economy the way it is, I can only see crime getting worse. Desperate people do desperate things. They often feel they have no other choice.
Joyce, several months ago on this blog I half-jokingly predicted that soon there’d be “flash-mob robberies” of grocery stores. Well, in December, I served on a jury. The charge was robbery, and it involved a store that had been repeatedly robbed by groups of men who’d go into the store in packs. They would rip stuff off, and they would assault the clerks and security guard if anyone tried to stop them. I couldn’t believe it was really happening. Call me Nostradamus (grin).
My Grandfather had an interesting perspective on the depression of the 30’s that applies today I think.
Joe Balch (you can google him) had grown up in North Dakota in the twenties and thirties and experienced the depression and an outbreak of Tuberculosis at the same time. His thought was that those who try hard will suffer just as much as those who don’t. Rich or poor, classy neighborhood or urban projects didn’t really matter.
Everyone gets kicked just as hard. The difference is not whether or not you get kicked, its how you respond and what you do to improve your situation.
In his case back then, he started on his way to Alaska, but ended up in a coal mine in Wyoming, then in the Marines for WW2. In the end he got to Alaska, but not until ’46.
If you’d seen him its unlikely you’d think he had much money at all. But after homesteading a huge tract of land for nearly 60 years he was a millionaire by the time he died at 84. How did he do it?
Simple hard work. He farmed. He was an inventor. He never took loans…for anything. If he couldn’t pay cash, he lived without. He looked like a plain old Joe living in the Arctic outback, but none of the depressions, recessions, or bear markets ever really hurt him. Even when he did lose a ton of money in the late 70’s recession (a few hundred thousand from one of his inventions vanished in a bad investment) he just tightened his belt and kept on trucking.
I think we all stand to learn something from guys like him. Don’t let the depression depress you, just think of it as a challenge and find a way to surmount it. That’s what Grampa did.
I think we’re all going to have to learn how to live like your grampa, at least for a while, Dana. The last couple of generations–and their leaders–have taken easy credit and living large for absolute granted. A massive grinding of gears is taking place right now. We’ll see how well we all adapt to it.
To me, it shows how important it is to do as Bail says. Treat others the way you wish to be treated. If you can help others, do. There are always those who are worse off than we are. There are always ways to serve. We simply have to open our eyes and hearts.
God bless the Mason’s, and all those who suffer these days.
And Kathryn, I use the sadness when I write sad scenes, but I do not write these things into my books.
Surprisingly, I haven’t seen many effects here in Seattle, but we tend to lag trends from the rest of the country. Of course, Boeing, Microsoft, and Starbucks have laid off thousands, and I personally know friends who were let go, not to mention my 401K suffering a sudden case of hemophilia (clot, damn you, clot!).
But on a daily basis, it seems like business as usual. Shops and restaurants are still full. Few businesses are completely shutting down. Homes continue to sell, although more slowly.
We’ll see what happens in six months, but I could see the rest of the US go into recovery mode before we hit bottom. Luckily, Seattle’s murder rate is tiny compared to most other cities, and I hope it stays that way.