Before entering the secure and not lucrative world of public service, I spent the first ten years or so of my career working for a private consulting firm. It was a good place to start and I did crazy fun stuff in some pretty amazing places. I worked in Alaska, California, Colorado, Idaho, Wyoming, and Nevada (more or less in order of how exciting those locales were). I flew in helicopters and stayed in a fishing lodge once where we were served prime rib and fresh Dungeness crab once a week.
When things were going hot in the American economy, I was in whatever the catbird seat is, and things were looking pretty great. For someone who was willing to try anything, it was as good a place to get a career start as I can imagine. I got my fingers into every plum the environmental permitting world had to offer, skipping through baking hot oil fields, flying in float plains and riding in catamarans, collecting overtime, and saying, "what a good boy am I."
On one job I would do burrowing owl surveys in the morning, starting around 4:30 AM. Then I'd survey for cactus for 10 hours. Then I'd finish with an evening of burrowing owl surveys. I was into overtime by Wednesday lunchtime. Another job saw me doing owl surveys all night and then a breeding bird survey at sunrise before trying to sleep the day away in a too-hot cabin surrounded by enormous ponderosa pine trees and noisy California quails.
I accrued enough frequent flyer miles and free hotel visits to take my family to Oregon to visit my sister, and we stayed in the nicest hotels I'd ever seen. I grew up either camping in KOAs or going from Motel 6's to Motel 8's and sleeping on a roll-away bed that was too short for me, and I knew at the time that this gravy train would someday stop, and that my kids would be ruined forever by good hotels and top-notch complimentary breakfasts. But I didn't care.
That's where I was when the sub-prime crisis hit. And for a while, I weathered it. It almost looked like I'd get through it without a scratch. I graduated with "just" a bachelor's degree and had a job in my field pretty much on day one. A couple of years later, I was helping review resumes for a temporary field tech job that I had been doing while I was still a college student, and was a little humbled by the quality of the candidates. This was for a job that literally consisted of walking back and forth and looking at the ground. The year before we'd been hiring river guides and snowboard instructors and now I was looking at resumes from people with PhD's who had until recently owned their own companies.
I was looking like a genius and eating crab in Alaska while the folks who went on to grad school when I hit the workforce were trying to get jobs that I'd had when I was a junior in college, and they weren't even getting those. Things were getting a little tighter, sure. It used to be there was always work in the oil fields when my day-to-day office work was getting old, but that dried up. That was fine, though, because the hotels there were gross, you couldn’t get a decent fish taco anywhere, and wind farms were where the fun work was anyway.
But then the wind farm subsidies went away. And a project we'd won that was supposed to keep us busy for the next ten years dried up. And then things got scary. Like best-friend cats who turn on each other when they can see the bottom of their food bowl, we started getting a little punchy among co-workers. When one's ability to pay their mortgage hinged on whether they were put on a project or not, we became hyper-aware of who was busy and who wasn't, and came up with all sorts of nefarious reasons.
Decision-makers who were overworked would still hoard their projects in fear of finishing too early and working themselves out of a job. Clients started paying very close attention to every line of the contracts and started asking that experienced biologists get pulled because their billing rates were too high, or refused to pay for travel, instead asking that we hire local temporary workers instead of keeping full-time employees busy.
Full-time employees started resenting temporary employees, and established staff started resenting the new, cheaper folks. There was a bit of we-were-here-first attitude. And also some main-office-employees-should-get-work-before-satellite-offices murmurings (I first wrote "murmurations," but when I looked it up found that it only applies to a flock of starlings, which is awesome). It wasn't the new people's fault that they lived closer to the projects. And they needed work, too.
At the end I was working about 24 hours every two weeks with a few hours of office work here and there in between and we were going to lose our house. It was really close, you guys. I was sending out 4-5 resumes a week without a single interview. I was super lucky to find a job in time. It meant that for a year while we tried to sell our house I commuted 4 hours to work, stayed at my parents’ house during the week, and drove 4 hours home for weekends. It certainly didn’t get easier overnight, and things are tight still, but also infinitely better.
There's a PTSD that sets in after something like this, and a lot of us have it. Not too long ago I sat down with my grandpa while he was interviewed about growing up during the Great Depression. He lived in a boxcar and they were lucky to have it. Like a lot of grandkids of my generation, I would sometimes laugh at him. He had a great job and a wonderful retirement and hadn’t worried about money for decades, yet he still relentlessly scoured the swap meet for brass antiques, which he would turn around and sell by the pound for a minor profit to a guy who would melt it down. After he passed and my grandma moved to an assisted living, we emptied out their condo. It was full of thrift store finds, still with their price tags on them.
The Great Recession left me with milder scars. I don't rinse off aluminum foil to reuse it yet. But it messed me up a little. I still don't want to buy a house, because I don't want to have to sell a house. I worry about losing my job. I worry about my wife losing her job. I see coworkers sometimes as trying to undermine me. I worry that I'll be replaced. I blame other people for my problems even when I know that I lost work at my old job because I didn't do good enough work the first time.
Imagine that on a nationwide scale and you can start to see where some of the political unrest we're dealing with comes from. When there was a lot of work at my consulting job, we loved each other. We loved the revolving cast of seasonal employees we met (except for the gross ones), and there was always more work and hours to go around than people to fill them. I loved mentoring new people and finding them opportunities. There were some paranoid people even then who didn't like to share, but it was pretty apparent how wrong they were. We needed to train up the people who would replace us before we went on to run the world.
I rebounded OK, and even though things are tight and sometimes we have to figure out how to feed a family of five with a combination of leftovers and our last $5. We are still eating. That's not the case for a lot of people. And for whatever reason, whether it's their fault or not, they want to blame someone. And that someone always ends up being a marginalized group.
Take immigrants, for example. We love the immigrant story when things are going gangbusters. Anyone not named Mike Pence who can afford to see Hamilton sings gleefully along (hopefully in their heads, because you guys) at the phrase "Immigrants, we get the job done." That's pretty easy. It's tougher to root for someone who has way fewer advantages than you but seems (from the outside) to be doing better. Why should they have a job when I don't, you may find yourself saying. They shouldn't even be here.
It's like being angry that someone is getting that sweet 1.50 hot dog and soda combo at Costco and you know they don't have a membership. There's nothing that makes Americans angrier than someone who looks like they are flaunting the rules and having a great time doing it. We assume the worst, because that's the narrative that makes us feel the best. You see someone parking crappy or speeding by themselves in the carpool lane and you wish you were driving the Condormobile with lasers and rear-mounted flamethrowers.
Now don’t get me wrong. When you or I park crappy or speed, it's always, always for a good reason. It’s just when they do it, it isn’t.
Taylor Swift fans got a lot of flack for crying on camera because they couldn’t get tickets to the Eras Tour. Because there were bigger things to worry about. And of course there always are. But I get it. Scarcity makes us all lose ourselves a little. It feels crappy when there isn’t enough of something even though you’re willing and able to pay for it. Nobody thinks you’re comparing yourself to a refugee; it’s still ok to grieve a little.
Years ago I was near apoplectic when I found out that I couldn't get an SNES Classic preorder because resellers were using bots. I couldn't believe the unfairness. They weren't following the rules and were getting rewarded for it. But when I got an email a little later saying that a few more preorders opened up and I managed to snag one, suddenly I was pretty zen about it. Like, I was still mad because other folks weren't getting one and my heart hurt for them, but I wasn't that mad.
As much as our bleeding hearts hemorrhage for people we know are suffering, it never seems to compare to when the thing we want—whether it’s necessities like food or shelter, or just a record that was only pressed 300 times—isn’t easily obtained. It kinda scares me.
I first wrote this pre-pandemic. I had no idea how things would get. But even as susceptible as I was given my comorbitities, I found myself insulated from the worst of it. I never had to work in the office when I didn’t feel safe. I never missed a paycheck. The difference in my situation during two international crises could not have been more different. I know I have trauma from that—principal among them the amount of people who I thought loved me who were advocating for restrictions to be lessened at my expense for their convenience—but my main thought so far is just how lucky I have been.
Since then, scarcity has been so consistent that the joke is the endlessly recycled one about whatever is inexplicably rare and expensive this month. Toilet paper, housing, gasoline, eggs, etc. And I don’t need to list examples proving that we’ve yet to figure out how to maintain our humanity in the face of that.
Yet scarcity can also make us the most human we can be. I try to follow Fred Rogers’ “Look for the helpers,” advice and there are always such amazing stories in the most dire of circumstances. Like regular German folks hiding strangers in their houses during the holocaust at profound risk, just because it was right. This man, a Muslim in seiged Gorazde, brought a liter of milk from his cow every day for 221 days to a young Serbian family with a baby. All while being mocked by his neighbors for feeding the enemy. Years later, when reporters found him to tell his side of the story, all he wanted to know was “And the baby? How is she?”
Do you ever find yourself missing those “we’re all in this together,” days of those first few weeks? Bands were doing free concerts for streaming, teachers were coming up with creative ways to remind the kids they teach how loved the are, even standing in line at grocery stores with carts full of the weirdest stuff it felt like everyone was cheerful about it. Why did we let them turn us on each other so easily? We know that tv complainers and political candidates depend on us constantly being neck and neck, yet we still fall for it every danged time.
I’m fascinated by how as individuals we can learn from history, but on large scales it doesn’t seem to make a difference to point out that we’ve all been through this before and pretty much every step of the way we’re getting it wrong has been done dozens of times before. People in power who depend on us being divided have never changed their tactics because they always work. It was hard enough to try to vaccinate a population against an actual virus. How do we inoculate ourselves against minor divisions?
I really want to know because I keep falling for it, too.