Some say the Great Recession is nearly history, but tell that to any metro Atlantan who has lost a home, job or sense of financial security.
Today brings another dose of unemployment medicine, and it would take a miracle for the jobless rate to drop below double digits. A record high number of foreclosures were announced this week too.
Even for those fortunate enough to keep jobs and homes, the two-year-plus recession has spread an aura of financial foreboding that warps the American psyche. The work-hard, play-fair dictum — the essence of the American Dream — guided generations of Georgians. But the dream, if not dead, lies tattered.
A year ago, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution set out to qualify the recession’s impact on the American Dream. We profiled five Atlantans from all walks of life: urban and suburban; wide-eyed teens and near-retirees; entrepreneurs and company men.
All ascribed to various interpretations of the American Dream. All have had their bedrock assumptions of success shaken. Some fared much worse.
A year later the newspaper revisited the dreamers, including Delilah Smith, a small-business owner who may lose her home in Gwinnett County.
“What happened to the American Dream?” she wondered. “Well, we’re still hanging on to it by our fingernails.”
Unlike previous recessions that decimated the less-educated and the blue-collar workers, the Great Recession is an equal-opportunity destroyer of dreams. Minorities and the poor, as usual, have suffered the worst the economy has, or hasn’t, to offer. But white-collar jobs too have disappeared in droves, sundering suburban neighborhoods, churches and marriages.
This recession has also introduced something different and more pernicious into the American ethos: a feeling that the world is off-kilter and won’t regain its traditional balance. Months of bad news about jobs and housing has been coupled with never-ending wars, Wall Street bailouts, a state budget morass and a sense of political futility that nobody on Capitol Hill or under the Gold Dome can solve.
This being America, somebody has taken a State of the American Dream Survey. Xavier University in Cincinnati revealed Monday that three of every five Americans believe reaching the American Dream is harder than it was for their parents.
“America is not what it used to be,” said Walle Waters, a top-notch salesman who quit Atlanta for Orlando after 18 months without a job. “We don’t have a lot of control over anything anymore.”
About this series
It’s the American Dream, and it nearly ended for legions of metro Atlantans.
They worked hard. Played by the rules. And expected, like generations before, to reap the benefits of jobs well done.
But the Depressionlike economy ended up dousing many dreams.
One year ago, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution introduced you to some victims of the economic morass.
Today, we’ll see how their lives – and dreams – have changed over the last 12 months.
