[Nyclocal] Herbert: Letters From Vermont

[William Wharton]

NY TIMES
June 14, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
Letters From Vermont
By BOB HERBERT

Despite the focus on the housing crisis, gasoline
prices and the economy in general, the press has not
done a good job capturing the intense economic anxiety
— and even dread, in some cases — that has gripped
tens of millions of working Americans, including many
who consider themselves solidly middle class.

Working families are not just changing their travel
plans and tightening up on purchases at the mall.
There is real fear and a great deal of suffering out
there.

A man who described himself as a conscientious worker
who has always pinched his pennies wrote the following
to Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont:

“This winter, after keeping the heat just high enough
to keep my pipes from bursting (the bedrooms are not
heated and never got above 30 degrees) I began selling
off my woodworking tools, snowblower, (pennies on the
dollar) and furniture that had been handed down in my
family from the early 1800s, just to keep the heat on.

“Today I am sad, broken, and very discouraged. I am
thankful that the winter cold is behind us for a
while, but now gas prices are rising yet again. I just
can’t keep up.”

The people we have heard the least from in this epic
campaign season have been the voters — ordinary
Americans. We get plenty of polling data and alleged
trends, but we don’t hear the voices of real people.

Senator Sanders asked his constituents to write to him
about their experiences in a difficult economy. He was
blown away by both the volume of responses and “the
depth of the pain” of many of those who wrote.

A 55-year-old man who said his economic condition was
“very scary,” wrote: “I don’t live from paycheck to
paycheck. I live day to day.” He has no savings, he
said. His gas tank is never more than a quarter full,
and he can’t afford to buy the “food items” he would
like.

His sense of his own mortality was evident in every
sentence, and he wondered how long he could continue.
“I am concerned as gas prices climb daily,” he said.
“I am just tired. The harder that I work, the harder
it gets. I work 12 to 14 hours daily, and it just
doesn’t help.”

A working mother with two young children wrote: “Some
nights we eat cereal and toast for dinner because
that’s all I have.”

Another woman said she and her husband, both 65, “only
eat two meals a day to conserve.”

A woman who has been trying to sell her house for two
years and described herself as “stretched to the
breaking point,” told the senator, “I don’t go to
church many Sundays because the gasoline is too
expensive to drive there.”

Many of the letters touched on the extremely harsh
winter that pounded Vermont and exacerbated the
economic distress. With fuel prices sky-high, many
residents turned to wood to heat their homes. A woman
with a 9-year-old son wrote:

“By February, we ran out of wood and I burned my
mother’s dining room furniture. ... I’d like to order
one of your flags and hang it upside down at the
Capitol building. ... We are certainly a country in
distress.”

Senator Sanders, an independent who caucuses with the
Democrats, remarked on the disconnect between the
harsh economic reality facing so many Americans and
the Pollyanna claims of the Bush administration and
others over the past several years.

The assertion that the economy was strong and getting
stronger, repeated with the frequency of a mantra, hid
the reality that working Americans have been taking a
real beating, said Senator Sanders.

He pointed out that over the past seven or eight
years, millions of Americans have lost health
insurance coverage, lost pensions, and become deeply
mired in debt. During that period, the median annual
household income for working-age Americans fell by
about $2,400.

“Americans work the longest hours of any people in the
industrialized world,” the senator said. “We even
surpassed Japan.”

But despite all that hard work — despite explosive
improvements in technology and increased worker
productivity — the middle class is struggling, losing
ground and there’s a very real possibility that the
next generation of workers will have a lower standard
of living than today’s.

The letters to Senator Sanders offer a glimpse into
the real lives of ordinary people in an economic
environment that was sculpted to favor the very rich.
One of the letters was from a woman in central Vermont
who said she and her husband are in their mid-30s, are
college-educated and have two young children.

“We are feeling distraught,” she said, “that we may
never ‘get ahead’ but will always be pedaling to just
keep up.”