MIDDLE CLASS MELTDOWN
Ten years ago, as 2009 dawned in America, optimism tried to make peace with uncertainty. The historic nature of the 2008 election and the impending inauguration of Barack Obama had to exist side by side with the fallout of a tremendous economic meltdown. The country was mired in the throes of a recession caused by the bursting of a subprime mortgage bubble, the collapse of banking giants, and a general lack of accountability brought on by deregulation. Businesses died, fortunes disappeared, and homes were lost to foreclosure. This is the story of but one of the many families that slid into joblessness and debt through no fault of their own.
On Halloween in 2008, about six weeks after Lehman Brothers collapsed, my mother called from Michigan to tell me that my father had lost his job in the sales department of Visteon, an auto parts supplier for Ford. Two months later, my mother lost her own job working for the city of Troy, a suburb about half an hour from Detroit. From there, our lives seemed to accelerate, the terrible events compounding fast enough to elude immediate understanding. By June, my parents, unable to find any work in the state where they spent their entire lives, moved to New York, where my sister and I were both in school. A month later, the mortgage on my childhood home went into default for lack of payment.
After several months of unemployment, my mother got a job in New York City fundraising for a children’s choir. In the summer of 2010, I completed school at New York University, where I received a B.A. and an M.A. in English literature, with more than $100,000 of debt, for which my father was a cosigner. By this time, my father was still unemployed, and my mother had been diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer. She continued working, though her employer was clearly perturbed that she’d have to take off every Friday for chemotherapy. To compensate for the lost time, on Mondays she rode early buses into the city from the Bronx, where, after months of harrowing uncertainty, my parents had settled. She wanted to be in the office first
