Maybe you, like me, felt gloomy already. But when I read these words, it was like someone crystallized it all, then put a big black blanket over my head:
“Everything in the country is broken. Not just Washington, which failed to prevent the (2008) financial catastrophe and has done little to protect us from the next, but also race relations, health care, education, institutional religion, law enforcement, the physical infrastructure, the news media, the bedrock virtues of civility and community.
“Nearly everything has turned to crap.’’
That grim assessment came in a New York magazine essay by Frank Rich, famed cultural and political critic and executive producer of HBO’s “Veep’’ and “Succession.’’
He traces the gloom back to the Great Recession, in 2008, and says it never left. The government didn’t fix the mess. Americans recognized the system as rigged for the rich. Barack Obama sent not a single Wall Street bandit to jail while regular Joes and Janes paid the price, losing jobs and homes.
Debt now cripples millennials. Boomers can’t afford to retire. Half of Americans who live in poverty have at least one working adult in the home.
Workers are without significant wage gains despite 4 percent unemployment, tax cuts, and a booming stock market. Suicide rates have risen 30 percent since 1999, and opioid deaths abound.
Rich does not blame all this on President Trump, but he does say Trump’s genius was to “exploit and weaponize’’ a discontent brewing over decades.
Once upon a time, he writes, Americans trusted that when the going got tough enough, politicians would put the country first and do the right thing. Who believes that anymore?
I read all this. I thought, he’s right. But what now? Give up? Head to the Tobin? Take heart, at least, that before the worst happens, baby boomers like me will be dead?
In an interview last week, Rich said he does have hope, particularly in the young, like the Parkland teenagers, and millennials, “despite their unsavory reputation.’’ They have a huge incentive to fix their elders’ mistakes, he said. And they can start by voting in large numbers for Democrats “to put a halt’’ to Trump’s worst excesses.
Harvard Business School historian Nancy Koehn offered optimism too. Her book, “Forged in Crisis: The Power of Courageous Leadership in Turbulent Times,’’ profiles explorer Ernest Shackleton and Nazi-resister Dietrich Bonhoeffer, among others, and makes you yearn for a selfless integrity nearly nonexistent today.
Koehn finds hope in new politicians running for office now: women, veterans, both Democrats and Republicans “not tainted by complicity in the last 15 to 20 years.’’
But she also sees the nation at a crucial “inflection point.’’ We either start making right choices, or else . . .
Yet too often we’re unable to make right choices on a small scale, even here in Massachusetts, one of the smartest and richest states in a country that, gloom aside, remains the richest on earth.
We’ve known for decades that poor kids here don’t get the education they need, but Massachusetts’ funding formula has not been updated for 25 years.
Three years ago, a commission found things horribly out of whack: the state was underfunding schools by $1 billion to $2 billion a year. That gave the Legislature ample time to fix this so children in Brockton, for example, would not be jammed into classrooms with 38 kids, not enough desks or books, and just $1.28 to spend per student on supplies. That compares to $275 per student in affluent Weston.
But did Beacon Hill politicians, who voted themselves a big raise last year, keep working this summer until they righted this crushing wrong? No, they did not. Leadership sent our supposedly full-time lawmakers home for five months — until January 2019 — with vague promises of fixing things then.
Who trusts anymore that they will?
Margery Eagan is cohost of WGBH’s “Boston Public Radio.’’ Her column appears regularly in the Globe.
