During the Presidential campaign, Barack Obama talked a lot about average folks struggling to get by: a teacher keeping up with mortgage payments while sending their kid to college, or a skilled machinist in Ohio who saw his job shipped overseas and had to go without health insurance. As a politically observant person (some would say obsessed, but they haven’t tasted the sweet nectar of polling data), I viewed this rhetoric for what it was: rhetoric. Obama and his team of freakishly competent advisers crafted a message that would tap into folks’ insecurity about the economy. As a wanna-be Democratic operative I saw this as a good thing – Obama was doing what he needed to do in order to get elected – and I viewed it from a distance: My job was safe, I didn’t need to worry. I wasn’t a machinist in Ohio, I was a knowledge worker in New York. I had no connection to Joe the Unemployed Plumber.
Until now.
There is nothing that hammers home the idea of impermanence like sitting across from a nervous, fidgeting Human Resources professional who is trying to bend words like “economic climate” and “impacted revenue” and “termination” to sound positive, even jaunty, while you’re getting laid off.

My first thought was, “Thank God, they don’t know about the highlighter that ‘fell’ into my bag yesterday.” My second was an image of a spider’s web, rapidly expanding, branching off, connecting all the small and large parts of my life that were about to change – the physical therapist, donations to charity, sleeping in, bond paper for resumes, telling my mom, plans for next summer, the price of instant oatmeal. In an instant, my mind tried to do a Total Damage Assessment but the sheer interrelatedness of it all was too much and I crashed. I sat, dazed, as the HR professional pointed emphatically to a piece of paper and said, “should you choose to sign this….”
The last couple of days, after I calmed down and made a game plan and learned about unemployment insurance, I’ve been having a strange sensation. I remember a snippet of a campaign speech about some struggling working class person in Des Moines or Scranton and realize, fleetingly, that this is real. This is a recession. We are entering a period that will be significant enough in its disruption that someday we’ll be old-timers talking about when things were tight, “back in the 10’s,” just like our parents talk about the 70s or mid 80s today.
And the sense coming out of Obama’s transition team is that things will get worse before they get better.
So I’ve been thinking about impermanence and the nature of interconnectedness. I considered myself distant and insulated from this mess, unconnected to the machinist in Ohio by virtue of my urban home and college degree. My job in a law firm was secure because law firms are supposedly ‘recession proof.’ The logic goes: Mergers are down, bankruptcy and litigation go up. The problem is, corporations don’t even have the money to sue each other.
I’m not trying to be doom-and-gloom, or elicit sympathy. The cool thing about interconnectedness is that it applies not just to a bank in Taiwan that implodes and causes you to lose your job, but to people as well. Communities pull together and friends look out for each other; it is the best part of our inherent nature.
My friend Elise said recently, “I bet we’re going to see the marriage rate go up in the next five years” as people re-discover the economic and emotional benefits of getting hitched. A recession is also good for religion and spirituality, so excuse me while I go hit the cushion. And then look for a job.