Losing our house to the bank
during the Reagan-Bush recession tended to
concentrate
my attention. I read Barbara Ehrenreich's
Fear of Falling: The Inner Life
of the Middle Class.
That was one fear I didn't have anymore. I had fallen.
Just
before it happened, I shared at a meeting for unemployed,
or underemployed professionals,
that we were about to lose our house,
and another man said he'd lost his house,
his wife had left him, he was living in
his car, and his car was about to be repossessed
by the finance company. What is
left--the street? Reagan-Bush would pluck the
pennies off a dead man's eyes.
They picked us clean, at any rate. We kept our
two clapped-out Key West cars
to get to work in. After times got better. That
is, after a Democrat got in,
and the economy improved. It was the economy, stupid.