How Deep Is The Ocean?

I just returned from Western Pennsylvania, where I lived for twenty years. This was the western Pennsylvania that inspired President Obama's "guns and religion" comment and John Murtha's description of the populace as "racist rednecks". Each wave of recession that swept over the national economy took a little more from the area- a few more businesses, a little more paint off the houses, a few more young families out of the area in search of better jobs.
But this time, I had been away for nearly a year, and in the interval the national economy experienced something between a depression and a recession. In western Pennsylvania, the "something" clearly resembled the former rather than the latter. It was like homecoming after the apocalypse. The town where I used to live had been hollowed out- abandoned, boarded up houses gapped like missing teeth in middle class residential neighborhoods; over half of the store windows were empty. Groups of men and boys smoked cigarettes on street corners and in front of convenience stores. The color of the street corner loungers was white; one of them wore a "KKK" baseball cap. Except for that, I could have been could have been in Detroit's inner city.
The national media had, for at least a month, been proclaiming that economic recovery had begun. Housing starts were up; the stock market had stabilized; the surfaces of the national political economy were regaining their former shine. Even the optimists admitted that problem areas remained: consumers were reluctant to spend, the unemployment statistics were still upsetting; rates of mortgage foreclosure continued to increase. But, on the surface- which is to say at the top- things have been looking much better.
And this is the precisely the problem. Most politicians, policymakers, economists and social scientists focus on the political economic surfaces. We suffer from paradigm-blindness: we don't see anything beyond the accepted statistics, beyond the boundaries established by the latest Research Funding Proposal, beyond the t0pics that speed us to publication.
Focusing on the surface, we have lost sight of the bottom. We respond quickly to difficulties that show up on the surface. Reports, policies, and papers chart the difficulties and devise solutions to return us to something more like normal.
But beneath the surface, an invisible process goes on: the bottom is steadily eroding. As the lives of individuals, sectors, and geographic regions at the bottom deteriorate, we miss the signs because we focus entirely on the surface. The bottom has been eroding for years.
The signs of erosion are there to read. They've been there for years. There is the increasing number of the uninsured. There is the rising number of families that juggle two, three, four minimum wage jobs. There is the increased need for minimum-wage working families to depend on food banks, rental assistance and even homeless shelters to survive. There is the increased gap between the wealthy and the middle class. There is the massive loss of the family homes that served as primary asset for those at the bottom. But we've learned to ignore all that.
And so, as the waves stop and the yachts return, we anticipate a return to smooth sailing. But this is the thing about an eroding bottom: when the waves return and boats on the surface begin to capsize, a deeper ocean is a more dangerous place to tread water until help arrives.