Today on Facebook, a ski-bum friend who I had kind of lost track of, posted a link to USA Today story which reported that the “Jobs Market Getting Worse” in the United States of America. Which was kind of unusual, since the last time I skied with Scottie he was putting in over 120 days a year in Crested Butte, and working was probably the very last thing on his mind. His comment was “it’s all bad news, nowadays.”
And yes, in the United States, that seems to be the case.
Later that day, I saw a cover story in TIME magazine about the urban decay and landscape of hopelessness found in Detroit, and wondered how much had really changed there since, as a boy, I was driven through riot-torn streets to see a baseball game at Tiger Stadium, a place where the grass was so brilliantly green and the players uniforms so spotlessly white that you almost needed sunglasses to watch the game.
I thought about a story that I’d seen a day earlier in a financial newspaper, where a leading market analyst predicted that there would be a lot more pain for the American economy, and that the current S&P uptick would be followed by a dramatic decline in share prices, and anemic growth for at least the next decade. “A V, followed by an L, was how he described it.
I left a particularly depressing message on my friend’s voice mail, because, frankly, I’ve certainly had some unemployment issues of my own to deal with, and I’ve likely been reading too many negative article for my own good, anyway.
Later that night, though, I sat down to watch the final installment of Ken Burns’s series on American national parks. Like Burns’s previous series on the Civil War, and other PBS shows on the civil rights movement and on World War II, the development of America’s national parks – make the National Parks – faced absolutely enormous obstacles and public opposition, every step of the way. I wasn’t aware of the epic struggles that creation of legendary places like Yosemite, the Grand Canyon, and Denali faced at virtually every step. I meekly assumed that it was such a great idea, everyone must be on-board.
For the decade and a half before I settled down and had kids, I visited a lot of US national parks. Like the Germans that my parnter and I met at the deserted motel with on the outskirts of Bryce Canyon National Park on a frigid November night, we were in love with not just the wildness, but the very idea of the American parks – grand cathedrals of nature, accessible to all. Over two decades, I spent a lot of my vacation time in North Cascades, Glacier, Rainier, Crater Lake, Olympic, Yellowstone, Arches, Canyonlands, Bryce, Glacier Bay, Denali, and even a few hours at the south rim of the Grand Canyon, taking a half day off from a trade show. Not a bad list, if I say so, myself.
Y’know, nobody can do myth and tell stories quite like Americans can. I swept a tear from my eye as this US parks official told this wonderful story about hiking with his son and seeing mountain goats. It reminded me of my first ever camping trip to Glacier National Park with my brother in 1978.
We stopped for a beer in a bar in nearby Whitefish and met this great ol’ bullshitter who called himself Uncle Pat. Who, as our barmaid told us when he got up to take a pee… ‘used to be the biggest man in Montana, but now he’s nothing…’ My brother and I got a good laugh out of that one – you would never hear that kind of story in Canada. “He used to be the biggest man in Manitoba, and now he’s nothing” doesn’t carry the same ring.
Here in Canada, a lot of us are feeling pretty damn smug these days. The 2010 Vancouver Olympic and Paralympic Games are coming, and after some kvetching and finger-pointing – the general mood ’round town is certainly improving. There was even a blaring headline about ‘Thousands of Games Jobs Go Begging’ which was interesting, because I got called in for an interview for one of those very jobs because I need one! Every day, the papers say we’re doing so much better than our neighbours to the south. As an erstwhile member of the press, though, I don’t believe everything that I read. I know how easy it is to get it wrong.
Burns’s National Parks special got me to thinking about the current political and economic situation in the United States in another way. Just last week, I went and saw both a foot specialist and took my daughter to a walk-in clinic when she came down with the flu. Though my financial circumstances are a bit straitened, for now, I had only to present my CARE card and get an examination, free of charge. What might have happened if I had to put those medical expenses on a credit card that charged 24.5 percent interest, when the prime rate is close to zero?
Do you know what the world needs right now? It does not need a rising middle class in Brazil, India, China, or Russia, though the BRIC countries likely will sustain the global economy here in the medium term. What it really needs is for America to find its groove again. Stephen Mather, architect of the US national parks system, Bill Gates, inventor of the personal computer, and Al Gore, inventor of the internet (OK, strike that last one) did not change America – and the world – by working a 37.5 hour week with two fifteen minute coffee breaks.
When I first moved to Vancouver in 1982 – God, can it really be 27 years ago? I had the interesting experience of getting to know several Americans who essentially had been draft-dodgers and now called Canada home. But what I soon discovered was… you could not take the “American” out of them. That incredible can-do spirit – I first heard that phrase in a Jan Morris article – certainly applied to my roommate. Back in 1983, he worked tirelessly for months on a computer program he claimed “will be better than Microsoft Word” but then ended up giving it away as freeware.
The challenges in the post-modern world are obviously enormous. There’s cancer to beat, for one. Converting automobiles (though I do love bikes and live in a city with a much-improved urban transit system), to cleaner, cheaper, more efficient fuel (natural gas, anyone?), is another. There’s tasty, healthy, non-pesticide laden crops to grow, and building technology to develop so that we can at least nullify a few of the potentially disastrous effects of global warming. The citizens of Seward, Alaska, Burns tells us, who were pretty much 99 percent opposed to a new nearby national park, came to like it so much that they lobbied to have its size increased. Who knows, maybe even the Tea Party members can have their minds changed about Medicare; stranger things have clearly happened.
But to do that, America is going to have to step up its educational system in a big way. Just last week, a parent I know with kids in the school system lamented “when did English become so easy, and math so tough?” As someone who wrestled with my son’s algebra problems just last week, I completely agreed. Barbie was right, math class IS tough.
But, and as a writer it pains me to say this, the fact is that in today’s world numeracy is more important than literacy (interesting, MS-Word did not recognize the word ‘numeracy.’). The great strides that we are going to need in order to solve these problems will come from engineers, scientists, mathematicians, accountants, project managers, and designers who have developed the mental discipline and creativity to crack the code. Even Obama knows this, when he challenged blacks to aspire to be more than just rappers and b-ballers. As a friend pointed out, “there’s a reason why there was a mortgage meltdown in the United States. A lot of people are pretty stupid at math, and don’t realize, for instance, that a mortgage rate of six percent is one hundred percent larger than three percent.”
Unlike math, a grammar error won’t ruin your life.
Alas, teaching in both the United States and Canada could be so much better. Respect for the process of learning (I actually felt really great when I was able to solve a couple of my son’s integer problems), paying good teachers a decent living wage and recruiting – and placing value upon – people who genuinely want to help others out are what’s needed in this new world. WTF – they can do it in India, Korea, and Singapore – why the hell not, here?
And… news alert for all you hipster artsies – most of the engineers, accountants, and scientists I know like the same cool bands and go to the same indie-cred movies and eat the same locavore diet that you do. So, fuck off with the superiority complex and the nerd jokes. It’s the stupid people watching reality TV and eating junk food.
In short, there are people who need help, and more importantly, as President Obama says need hope. There are millions of people hurting in the United States of America in this economic crisis – 30 million unemployed – that more people than live in Canada. Maybe an outing to a nearby national park would help nourish their soul. Maybe affordable medicine and dentistry would improve their health. Maybe sending their kids to school and encouraging a climate of problem solving and accomplishment would help. Because y’know, even if you fail, you learn. And while learning new tasks is difficult, it’s the key to a vibrant, energizing life. But you cannot always do it on your own, and the least a social safety net should offer is decent health care.
As the day wore on, news out of the States got worse. One website blared “Chicago Loses Olympic Bid” – proof of the, shall we say, rather insular way Americans view the rest of the world. Rio, and Brazil, weren’t even mentioned. Even Obama looked diminished and irrelevant as he shilled for the former “city of big shoulders” over the hip, vibrant, and young (and isn’t that what the Olympics are about – is feeling young?) – salsa capital of Rio. There was dancing at the Copacabana, where every girl is a Reef girl. Apropos of nothing, I absently wondered, “do Americans even have a clue that Luis Fabiano, Kaka, and Gilberto Silva are three of the greatest athletes in the world?
Except, of course, that just when you’ve given up on America, you read other stories. In a ballroom in Boston, Massachusetts, a group of athletes and donors came together to raise a record amount of money for the skiers, freestylists, and snowboarders on the United States Ski Team competing in this February’s 2010 Winter Games. “Vancouver Bound” – they are calling their campaign. Even Bode Miller is back on the team, after riding as a lone cowboy for the past four years. Lindsay Vonn creamed everyone on the World Cup circuit last year, and will surely be a media darling during 2010.
But that’s not the most interesting or potentially inspiring Olympic story, by any means. As reported in an entertaining article in the Wall Street Journal, of all places, a guy named Brian Burke was appointed to be the general manager of the United States Olympic hockey team. He’s not exactly a household name in the United States – but think, say, hockey’s ‘version of Vince Lombardi.’ With the smaller ice dimensions of the NHL sized rinks and his well known ability to play grinding, smash-mouth hockey, you cannot possibly concede the gold medal to Crosby and co. quite yet. Hell, given the arrogance with which Canadians feel they ‘own’ hockey and my love of the underdog, I might just sneak in a bit of a “USA! USA!” myself.
The Miracle on Ice in 1980 brought in an huge blast of optimism in an America worn down by Vietnam, Iran, and stagflation. Could a miracle on ice, followed by some imaginative health care and education policy similar to the legislation that created the US national parks service. Y’know, I bet it could.
All I can say is… “watch out. Watch the FUCK out.”
Because America is never down, for long.
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