Last night at the gym, a middle-aged black man who renovates houses for a living held forth on the proposed bailout: “Let them fail!” he raged. “Let them fail! People in this country need to wake up! Those banks and investors that were reckless shouldn’t get one dime, not one dime, from other people who work for a living!” He was mad as hell, and as he moved from bench to platform lugging lots of heavy weights, he continued without drawing a breath, “We have raised a whole generation to believe that they are entitled to everything, that if they make a bad decision, somebody else will bail ‘em out. If I make a bad decision, who bails me out? Nobody. Nobody. And I am sick and tired of people who think they deserve help because they didn’t get what they wanted. And here they go, telling me to vote for somebody because he’s ‘cute’? To hell with that.”
Now, John McCain’s wife may indeed think he’s cute, but the rest of us harbor no such illusions, so I think, particularly given where the conversation went after that, that he was not referring to John McCain.
He looked at another black man working out nearby and said “Does anybody seriously believe that we should vote for someone because he’s black? Does anybody really believe that anybody owes me anything because I am black?”
“Hell no,” said the second black man.
(You will, no doubt, want to know which Republican bastion is home to my gym, and I will tell you: Decatur—otherwise known as “a little Seattle in DeKalb County.”)
This is one of those conversations that us white people tend to stay out of. We are aware that there are undercurrents that we just wouldn’t understand and that, in fact, our presence might well distort. So, although I’d previously been engaged in conversation with the second black man I mentioned, I held my tongue and pretended to look for a weight bench. The second black man changed the conversation back to the bail out and he said “Even if we gave them the money, they’d just do the same thing with it again. You can’t let people keep making mistakes without paying for it.”
The whole gym was rife with talk of the bailout last night. Whereas the home renovator and the school teacher in the free weights room were against it (and one of them, at least, was apparently against Barack Obama whom he saw as more supportive than McCain of the bailout), upstairs among the weight machines, the white realtors were complaining that if the bailout isn’t passed soon, even small mortgage companies will founder. They said that they know people with excellent credit who want to buy houses, but the banks are so petrified with fear that they aren’t making loans. Given that those same banks are the ones that back small businesses, they argued, if the bailout doesn’t get okayed soon, we’ll begin to see even bigger job losses than we have so far this year. What is particularly interesting about the financial crisis, to me, is the way that we all feel united in it—even if some are for the bailout and some are against it. The debates around me were spirited and open. They were intelligent and articulate. They were noticeably devoid of partisan rancor and the snide, bizarre chicanery promoted by Web sites that make conspiracy theories their business. These, instead, were real people, sharing a society, engaged in real debate—not an argument to prove who’s right, but an informed, energetic discussion to figure out what should happen now. This is a beautiful thing to hear—true debate is the lifeblood of a healthy democracy. It’s when we leave these discussions solely to the pols and the pundits that we abandon not only our democracy, but the free market that gives us a real stake in that democracy.
Obviously, a lot of people feel that we have to do something quickly—meaning a bailout—to protect us from a full-fledged depression, but in the middle of this discussion valuable insights are being shared about accountability and entitlement and how we need to tighten up as a country to make ourselves stronger. If we go through with the bailout—which I think is, unfortunately, necessary—but without recognizing how easy credit for just about everyone and his dog and reckless investments by Wall Street have contributed to this mess, then yes, “Even if we gave them the money, they’d just do the same thing with it again. You can’t let people keep making mistakes without paying for it.” SP