American Dream at War

When 100,000 mortgages turned up bad September of 2008, U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, along with a siren chorus of officials in the Bush administration, warned about the impending crisis at the investment banks up and down Wall Street, about how the public’s money was needed, that red-hot minute, to avert a prolonged recession, if not a depression. Then during the next three weeks, the fearing public eye turned more and more homeward. The word quipped by politicians on CNN was that the growing crisis wasn’t going to be just about Wall Street, but it was getting closer and closer every day to Main Street.

Nine months passed. The investment banks received $700 billion out of the first emergency package, and then they got major parts of the $787 billion Stimulus Package. Less noticed, the Federal Reserve quietly disbursed up to $6.9 trillion towards re-opening credit markets in the U.S. “Up to” because only the upper limits of some funding provisions were disclosed.

Inseparability

But the massive payouts, unprecedented in the history of the world, didn’t bring small businesses much help. The current recession hit them first, and it is hitting them the hardest. And the owners are taking it very much personally. That’s because every one of them is blessed, and cursed, with inseparability from their businesses, lack of separation from its ups and downs. It’s as if the trucks and racks of inventory are their arms and legs; as if their customers are their hands and feet. Something goes wrong, and these men and women hurt down in their hearts. They feel guilty. But after getting down, sometimes frighteningly down, they bounce out of it with some very clear and clever idea. Sometimes the idea works and sometimes it doesn’t. But there is always one more idea to try, this one a little better than the last.

When the investment banks of Wall Street dropped their bombs in 2008, they indeed blew craters all over Main Street. But that metaphor, designed to help people understand how the crisis is no longer in the abstract, doesn’t come even close. The bombs hit Adam and Frank and Shirley and Glenn—the owners of small businesses. The bombs blew them up inside. They hit their employees, both the ones recently let go and bumbling around at home trying to figure out what to do, and they hit the ones still hanging in there with their owner. They hit most of the 6 million small businesses around the U.S., making up 99.9% of the total count of businesses. They hit fully one-half of the employed people in the public sector who work for small businesses—at least it was one-half before the layoffs began.

Personal Struggle

Main Street is about the small businesses owners who run their establishments, all across the nation, and the millions and millions of people who work there. It’s a personal struggle, each owner in his own private world of pain, concerned about some possible action which if, by some stretch, could have been done would have prevented the layoffs. They’ve every one had layoffs, big layoffs for some. Right now each owner is fumbling through unpaid vendor bills sitting on his desk, and their wives and husbands are joining them, to do what they can, unpaid, to fill the new vacant spots.

And the struggle leads to new ideas, new angles on building up sales again, new products and new services never tried before, at least not tried with this new angle that’s being considered. It’s about everyday people waking up in the morning after another night of rotten sleep, pulling on their jeans and wrinkled shirts ready to go back to work to fix this thing.

These business owners and their staffs, today are serving as humble heroes—but not even knowing that someone might call them heroes, not even caring to know it—fighting every day to regain the American dream, first for themselves and their families, and then for their employees who will start buying things again, and finally for all of us.

Not a one of them, right now fighting this desperate recession, thinks he is in such a fight as all that, making small successes that spread to bigger successes, causing broader and broader ripples. Every one of them just wants to survive another month. Each defines the goal not in terms of making money to take home (sure, they say, that would be nice) but they talk about the objective of hiring their people back and getting their bills paid on time again. That’s what the money is for, to them.

Restoring the Dream

You don’t have to have a degree in economics to understand that what these small business leaders want to do is exactly what’s required to restore the American dream. It’s easy to figure out that the dream originally came true during the 50 years after World War II because of people just like these, who got up from the breakfast table preoccupied with a new idea about how to sell something and hire someone to help them do it. Small business has never been easy, but the late 1940’s leading into the 50’s were they heydays, with easy credit, soldiers coming home from war ready to go to work or back to school, and babies being born needing diapers and requiring bedrooms to sleep in with white fiberglass curtains.

Now the American dream has gone to sleep. The trillions being spent by the government haven’t taken hold, fuel prices are edging up again, foreign competition is higher than ever, the workforce is pocked with poor education and drugs. Now it’s either the American Dream lost, the Dream on hold, or the Dream reborn, just maybe, better than before. Whichever way it works out is entirely up to the likes of these heroes of Main Street.