Gentle Thunder
I
invite you to think about these lyrics to a song I wrote some time back after
driving down Burnside Avenue in Portland, Oregon when we saw a man and woman
with two little kids standing in the rain holding a sign. Ask yourself, “What
happened to them and why?”
I was driving with my wife, when we saw them.
A ragged family in late autumn. I asked
her to explain, "Did they blunder?"
She said, "it seems a rule a
poor man’s life is cruel. Their anger
and pain brew gentle thunder."
WILL WORK FOR FOOD, signs they hold.
Outcast from school, their waste foretold. With raw arid minds the weak go
under. "Is it a privilege to sleep beneath a bridge? Seeking shelter from
the rain, with gentle thunder."
Rebuild the values of our land.
Train all people with able hands. Give work to those who can. For where there’s
poor and rich men plunder; the clouds roll in,
with gentle thunder.
We strolled up to our penthouse,
with its doorman. And from our balcony, I still saw them. A soup line
containing kids made me wonder, “What can we do? They’re our children too.”
A storm blows in with gentle
thunder, with gentle thunder, with gentle thunder.
When I was in private practice some
parents brought their freckle faced eight year old boy in because he was
wetting the bed. The father exclaimed, “Doc, you’ve got to help us. Its causing
all kinds of problems. We’re having fights over this and we’ve tried everything
we can think of. We’ve taken him to our family physician and there’s nothing
wrong. I’ve tried spanking him, paying him anytime he had a dry bed and we even
got one of those pads with the alarm that goes off when he wets. Nothing
works!”
I asked the parents to step into my
waiting area while I talked with the little boy. Leon was slow to warm up, but
eventually he confessed. “I go to sleep, but they wake me up fighting. I hear
them yelling at each other and slamming doors. Sometimes I hear my mom throwing
things.”
I said, “it sounds like you’re
scared of something, what is it?”
Leon looked up at me with wide blue
eyes and as tears welled up said, “I’m scared they’re going to get a divorce!”
I assured him that this sounded like
an adult problem and I would try to help his parents work things out. I asked
him to go out and play with some toys in the waiting room and invited his
parents back in. Asking them for a little background, I said, “Tell me about
yourselves, you know, what do you do for a living and that kind of thing.”
The father explained that he once had
been a public school shop teacher, but had realized things were changing from
wood and metal shop towards technology instruction. He could see the writing on the wall and knew
he would have to retrain in computers or find another job. He had seen an
opportunity in the solar industry and started doing residential solar
installations. “We had over 1.5 million dollars in billables last year,” he
exclaimed proudly.
Mother did the books and billing
while the father ran a sixteen man construction crew. They had a large supply yard
with half dozen vans and trucks, and had recently opened a retail store-front
operation selling fireplaces and hot tubs.
At the mention of hot tubs, the mother exploded. “Yeah and
that’s why we’re having problems. You managed to get taken for thirty thousand
dollars from that so-called partner of yours!”
I had to call a time-out to get them to stop yelling. We had
touched a hot button. It seems they had opened the retail store front operation
recently because of concerns about whether the federal government was going to
renew the federal energy tax credit. For those who remember, during the energy
crisis when Gerald Ford was President of the U.S., one solution was to
encourage energy conservation by offering thousands of dollars of income tax
write-offs to individuals who embarked on super insulation, solar heating and
cooling solutions. Ronald Reagan’s administration didn’t see the value in such
an approach to energy, being more interested in developing new oil resources
through international politics and drilling activity. Therefore, Congress was
debating whether to renew the energy tax credits. Being a man with some
foresight, this dad was exploring other sources of income and had felt there
was a market for wood stoves and hot tubs. But his supplier had taken their
money and failed to deliver the hot tubs.
Like most Americans, this family had expanded their life
style to fit with their new found income. Qualifying for loans is different
from affording them. To qualify for a loan the bank looks only at one’s current
circumstance and assumes it will remain the same. Because of their 1.5 million
in billables, the couple had qualified for loans on a big Mac Mansion on five
acres, a couple of horses, and other toys. She drove a Cadillac while he had
the biggest quad cab diesel truck that Ford made. They had been to Mexico and
Hawaii and she sported a diamond the size of my index finger. After one of
their many fights, he had bought her a mink coat.
But times were shaky. They couldn’t make all their payments
if any one thing went wrong. They were scared and blaming each other for their
situation. Every evening after a long day at work, they would go home and have
a few glasses of wine, and then inevitably begin talking business. The
conversation would get heated after they put little Leon to bed. They would
scream and sometimes knock each other around. A few times she had taken off in
the Caddie to spend the night at a motel which made him suspicious. It wasn’t a
pretty sight.
Remember that old Bob Dylan song from the late 1960’s, The Times They are a Changing? Well, reality
is, the times are always changing, but they are mutating faster and more
chaotically. This pattern of boom-bust has been repeated by countless families
during the fabled Dot.com hype of the 1990’s, and again in the real estate sub
prime crisis of the early 2000’s. Human beings are short-sighted and we are
innately greedy. Economic history tells us that whenever things are going up,
they will always go down. One has to be prepared to ride the waves when they’re
coming into shore.
Too often we get caught up in the emotion of the situation.
We live in a highly interconnected world in which small changes at the macro (very
large) level ripple down to affect the lives of common people. Because we focus
on our immediate situation, haven’t learned to take the long view, and don’t
know how to access knowledge about these fast moving ocean currents, we get
planted face down on a coral reef. Instead of looking up to see the rocks ahead,
we blame those closest to us.
Leon’s parents were aware of some of these factors and were
trying to adjust, but were also caught up in the optimism of their moment.
Money is a deceitful master. It should be understood only as a
historical measure, not as a prediction about the future. Most people who have
been hammered by economic and political forces have been caught up in
irrational exuberance. When we hear that our house’s value is going way up and
are being pitched opportunities to take out home equity loans, it means that
some people are making big money on a trend. Usually trends are a result of
innovations in finance, technology or changes in laws, rather than fundamental worth.
We think, “Wow, look at my stock values! I can borrow money against my
portfolio -- I can retire young.” When you are riding up a huge financial
swell, it is often time to start getting cautious, not excited. It means the
wave is getting closer to shore and will break soon. Be ready to surf for all
you’re worth. |
