Economic Recovery Plan

It’s a phrase that’s been getting bandied about more and more lately, and today I finally heard it with more than just my ears. My mind took in the magic words: “Economic Recovery Plan” as the President-elect spoke them. This plan is supposed to make us all feel better, like those guys in charge have just the recipe for national money that will put us all at rest. Soon we’ll be able to shop again, right? I can confess to feeling a bit reassured by the onset of a new administration with the word “plan” on their lips and the gaggle of experts in the back pocket. But suddenly, today, I focused in on another part of that oft heard phrase... “Recovery”.

Recovery, really? Do they mean that? Could a plan for recovery really work for us? Let’s match up recovery and the economy.

January 21, 2009. Step one. We admit that we are powerless and that the economy is completely unmanageable by us.
If this is news to anyone alive between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans then this person needs serious rehabilitation, preferably in a battered women’s shelter that's facing foreclosure. Our every attempt to theorize about and resuscitate the economy has brought about still greater mocking failure. Give up, America. Put your busted paws in the air and surrender to collective culpability. We’re all going to each have to do this economic recovery together.

Step two. Come to believe a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
Whoa. Sounds extreme. We’ve already got “in God we trust” printed on the money. Isn’t that enough? Maybe the greater power isn’t some abstract and fluctuating diety. but a core belief that we are each no better than the other at heart. Maybe we just need to see that, while we cannot and do not wish to all be literal ‘equals’ in choice and lifestyle, no one deserves to be hurt or exploited for another’s comfort. What hurts one of us hurts all of us. That’s not so bad. It’s actionable – do no harm.

Step three. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the higher power as we understood it.
Not so unrealistic, really. We’ve been blindly doing that all along, trusting the government or the job to take care of us, with the gleeful side effect of being able to blame and whinge when we don’t get what we want. Perhaps the bigger challenge of this step in our collective economic recovery is for all citizens to DECIDE and to UNDERSTAND.

Step four. Made a searching and fearless inventory.
Ok, it all comes out eventually. Tricky Dick got caught, as did governor Blago and that rich fellow with his ponzi scam. There can only be one Jimmy Hoffa. Do we want to find out about this stuff generations from now, when the tapes have been combed over and the analysis done, just in time for our children to get busted making the same mistakes? Wouldn’t we rather have some transparent exposure now? It’s like the difference between pulling the band-aid off slowly or letting your big sister yank it off real fast. Pick the speed of your ouch. Money can be more difficult for folks to come clean about than their sex lives. But, its about more than just the games we play around money, fearing that there won’t be enough and that someone will take what we have. It’s a concise history of those moments when fear, selfishness and self pity have ruled the day and sacrificed the angels of our better nature like a sheep in the temple.

Step five. Admit to everyone the exact nature of our wrongs.
Admit the mistakes, the greed, the intention of harm and selfishness before you end up on Jerry Springer next to that overweight bit of trailer trash who wants to start a fight. Admit, as a nation, that while we are not all guilty of the specific acts that have made such a mess of the economy and our relationship with the world in general, we are all responsible. We all got quite used to things being this way and played the game just as much as any high roller. We all contribute to the problem just by being here.

Step six. Became willing to have these defects removed.
And we must pause, here, as some of these naughty little things we do are quite enjoyable. They’re NATURAL. We’ve done things like his for so long… what do you MEAN change? Give it up? Huh. I’ll get back to you on that.

Step seven. Ask a higher power to remove all these defects of character.
If we meant it when we did step six, then, well, nuff said.


This bit should take us until the end of the first Obama administration. And things will be looking and feeling much better. We may all well like our country much more. But it’s important not to stop. Hopefully by the time we vote him back in, the process of change will be so ingrained that no one will remember the days when it was the favorite buzz word of electioneering. Change will be an American addiction, but not a bad one like we have to fat, sugar and cigarettes. It will be a good one, like our addiction to air.

Step eight: Made a list of all persons or entities that we had harmed and became willing to make all of those situations better.
Well, we’ve had our mits in just about every pie all around the planet since the day after the ink on the constitution dried. So, this should be fun. Whom did we harm? Hm. The native American nations? The middle east? Southeast Asia? Africa? South America? The line between “that was selfish of us” and “the bastards deserved it” is pretty much a fractal. It gets more and more complicated the deeper we go. They WERE shooting arrows at us. They WERE pirating our ships. They DID kill our young boys. They DID send planes into our buildings. So lets just start by erasing “them”, whoever they were, from the equation because other people’s shit doesn’t belong on our balance sheet. In liberating our minds of what “they” did, we’ll see how collectively we’ve made decisions based upon self-interest that later placed us in positions to be hurt. WE wanted more land. WE wanted more money. WE wanted more of what was proportionally due us by nature and when we found there were people in the way of what we wanted, we figured out a tidy democratic way of saying “so what”. That right there? That goes on the list.

Did anyone notice, yet, that all this means economic recovery isn’t really just about money? Yeah. It hasn’t really been about money since step 1.

Step Nine:
Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
Important note: “Others” = other countries. There is no “other” who can point to any patch of dirt (or concrete) inside the US and call it home. Nobody gets to absent themselves from reckoning because their gender, race, orientation or union membership has caused them to appear at a disadvantage. Get off the pity pot, wipe your ass and get on with it. You’re an American, too. So, sorry, no remunerations for folks who can point to a slave in their lineage because we’d all be surprised how many ‘white’ folks fall under that umbrella. By way of slavery & indentured servant-hood, that categorization is another historic fractal. But, we do owe West Africa a great debt for having ripped their cultural fabric into unrecognizable shreds. It does mean that we publicly admit that we are often selfish, dishonest and wrong. What does it mean to do things differently, now? What would it look like to live in a way that does no harm? It might cost us much less than we feared and reward us much more richly than we’d ever dreamed. And won’t it be easier to stop covering up all the facts? But that’s just it. We start tasting the rewards here. Not after step 1.

Step Ten: continue to take inventory and when we are wrong, promptly admit it.
Note the word promptly. That means now, not in the next election cycle.

Step Eleven: Continued to make conscious contact with a higher power, asking only for knowledge of its will an for the strength to carry that out.
I know, scary. Why, now I give every nutter hearing voices a license to set off car bombs in the name of their God. But that’s not what this means. The God we seek to get in touch with here is that which is present within all other people; a collective spirit. And when we reach a state of behavior so as to treat our fellows in an un-hurtful manner, it will be far easier to see a god in them. There’s one bar against the acting out of odd “god inspired” craziness. Ask: will it do any harm?

“But if we “do no harm” there will be nothing that we’re capable of doing anymore! We won’t be able to take two steps without causing harm to some microbe? We’ll all look like Jains!”

Really? Aw c’mon. Use your imagination.

Step Twelve: Having had a spiritual awakening, we continue to practice these steps and to carry the message to others.
This should take us into the last year of the second term. Too bad we’ll have to say good-bye to Obama so soon. But think of what more can now really be done? This, THIS is the wonderful world Louis Armstrong warned us about in that song that still makes me cry.

I’m idealistic, I know. How in the heck to get Americans to stop pointing fingers long enough to accomplish such a task? Easy. Our life depends on it. The survival of our species on this planet in a manner that looks anything like “life” hangs in delicate balance. The alternative is a world that looks like Haiti: stripped bare of resources, crowded, underfed, chaotic.

How? Well, H.O.W. –honesty, open mindedness and willingness… these we have to find in ourselves, first.