Has the Recession Really Changed Us?

I've been living in Long Island since 2006.  After moving from another country, it was nothing short of a full starting over. Baby steps as you may call it, or starting small but playing catch up at the same time.  The race to get my two feet financially planted meant that I had to be resoruceful, ambitious and eager.  So it meant adapting to my first job, then my second, then my third, then my fourth.  Leaving behind old cultural upbringings of one country and supplanting another's.  I also formed my solidarity with Long Island, when the tolls of the recession started to hit home for real, for the first few, then watched it spread to the masses, as I too had to dig into my resurcefulness and adapt, yet again.  Through my various jobs, I was able to witness how corporate and governtment policy changes, affected both rich and poor, on the ground level. I saw decisions made that in other times would never even be considered.  But observing the long term actions of those who had to endure the latter, I have to ask, has the recession really change us?

Compliling experiences, it has been quite a personal chronicle, that I will lightly share with you.  I remember customers would be in all night enjoying each other's company and tipping $20 as a sign of respect, for keeping the server back because they were the last person in their section and we were trying to close. The brush fire craze of the smart phone even got passed the control of parents, with a smile, to the hands of children under thirteen years old. Even the elderly were able to keep up with technology.  Buying a high end car was soley a matter of affirming one's position in the social strata and showing off how much it cost just to service the vehicle, was like a spoptlight feature conversation amongst peers.  

As men, fathers, providers, bread winners, lost their careers, houswives having to find jobs, sometimes two.  I also got a chance to see, feel and hears its effects.  I saw families pull together, I saw families tear apart.  I saw families that just simply got lost. I've seen a father march his family into a store and traded in all their smart phones for all basic prepaid phones.  I've tasted the great results of a home maker turned cupcake baker, now with a client base that is allowing them to afford opening a store.  I've also wintessed a family in foreclosure, using the mortgage money that they should have been saving, to buy even more things for their home and making short term expensive decisions just because in order to be re-adjusted you have to "not pay" for a certain amount of months.  Reps felt the pinch, closing more accounts than opening them while some banks sharpened their policy teeth and bit harder.  Grocery shopping has turned almost everyone into a calculator professional, even myself, adding items up while going down the isles and agreeing on a dollar amount to spend, rather than being suprised at the register.  In my own circle I recently helped a freind downgrade from an SUV with an almost $500 a month payment to a sedan with just over a $300 a month payment.

But now that we've learned to use the toilet paper roll right down to the last ply glued on to the cardboard spindle, tearing it off and exacting our sweet revenge for having to spend extra for it, what have we really learnt?  There is a commonality, a solidarity to be evovled from times of crisis in the human psyche, so why isn't it more widespread at this time, now that we are still in the bowels of the recession?  The craftiness of the retail world has kept sales of high end products booming, my friends in my chatroom still show off their expensive purchases.  Friendships have been more lost than closer fused together.  Infidelity, is now more of an expectation, giving new meaning to the vow of "through thick and thin".  The burden of our Long Island mothers, have still not affected how two women in the street or a store interact with each other over a mere disagreement.  Instead of coming together and realising we are all in this, we get more selfish and more unforgiving, almost like we were BEFORE the recession, interesting isn't it? 

One thing stands true, we must go on.  Life continues and we are strong enough to live through this recession as our ancestors have lived through worse. But I can't help but notice that, these "life lessons" as a whole, should have changed us "as a whole" in some way or another to be more united or widen the common ground that we all are obviously in.  Our failure to recognise this "as a whole", whether for social staus reasons, or denial coping, or simple negative rewiring by thinking that the world is going to end up like the movie "The Road", is just another example that as advanced as we may get, we still haven't quite figured out how to become, "one".