Feeling down and squeezed

I did not live through the Great Depression, although my students believe I was born just before the dinosaurs died out. I'm not old enough to be wise, just disgusted. I am old enough to be invisible, but that's not a superhero power. It's a fact of life for the working poor who used to consider themselves middle class.

My parents were children of the Great Depression. Their families passed down the cautionary tales of that era whenever we sat together for a Thanksgiving dinner or other occasion. The stories influenced each of our personal relationships with money, material objects, employment, and the environment.

I have lived in a community blanketed in the fog of psychological and economic depression. We moved to Edmond, Oklahoma at Thanksgiving in 1987 when my oldest son was in kindergarten. It had been just over a year since the Edmond Post Office Massacre. Patrick Sherrill killed fourteen people and wounded seven, and to city residents the impact was far more significant than the origin of the terms, "going postal" and "disgruntled employee". We arrived a year and a half after a significant tornado hit parts of the town, including the subdivision next to ours. I met residents who still kept a mattress in their bathroom to place over their heads in a tornado. (Basements are mostly unknown in central Oklahoma, and the safest place in a storm is usually the bathtub.) The region was also submerged in the banking crisis of the 1980s, with residents trapped in negative equity mortgages and facing foreclosures. The city was growing rapidly, but was expanding in an enveloping aura of community-wide depression.

I wouldn't mind going back to Edmond to live. I loved the slightly scruffy Oklahoma landscape, the hawks and the scissortail flycatchers. I loved the outlaw Wild West history, and the comparative newness of the whole state. I just didn't like the mass depressive funk. I had enough anxiety of my own without the community piling on.

On our walks, my exercise buddy points out the places where she thinks she could live in a box when she becomes homeless. Down there along the creek, or back behind that hedge... She says I'll be glad that she's scouted out locations in advance for us when things really get bad. Thank you for planning ahead, I say. I know I will save the box next time I replace a decrepit home appliance.

We are squeezed. As a small child I used to watch with wonder when my mom put on her longline eighteen-hour girdle. It was a bizarre and uncomfortable squeezing dance. My generation rejected those undergarments, but now we have the economic equivalent. We are squeezed by gas prices, utility prices, the strangle-hold of health insurance, prescription costs, and the rising costs of a college education for our children. We see government's ineffectiveness in natural disasters, its arrogance and ignorance in environmental and energy policy, and the daily horrific events in Iraq. We are squeezed and existentially depressed. To top off the insults, my pharmacist says Zoloft is unlikely to go generic anytime soon.

It's cheering to know President Alfred E. Newman got off his bicycle long enough to get a briefing about avian flu. He's back to pedaling, while we are up shit creek without a paddle.