NY Times Book Review - Losing Our Way

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The New York Times – Sunday Book Review – 11/7/2014

Losing Our Way: An Intimate Portrait of a Troubled America by Bob Herbert

Review by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, author of “Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx.”

My father taught me to see what was missing from neglected public spaces — the opportunities rooted in overgrown woods, trash-strewn highways and busted public parks. “You could give young people work cleaning that land, and they’d be a part of something, and learn useful skills,” he would say. During the Depression, the Civilian Conservation Corps had been his school, where he had learned how to drive a truck, build lean-tos and benches, and helped support his parents.

Bob Herbert shares the same pragmatism, shaped by the America he came of age in, which still assumed a common good and treated the challenges facing its individual citizens as collective priorities we could solve. “Losing Our Way” is a brave call to action — not simply to put people back to work, but also to link that work to the necessary interests of an egalitarian society. This means investing in what we’ve catastrophically undervalued: our bridges and highways and tunnels, our public schools, our fellow citizens. Herbert approaches this monumental task the same way he approached such unpopular issues for almost 20 years in his Op-Ed column at this paper: case by case, week after week, with steady resolve. The shortsighted policies and unchecked greed that have resulted in the abandonment of the poor are now destroying the middle class, and Herbert remains willing to state, very clearly, what he sees.

After leaving The Times in 2011, Herbert traveled across America, visiting middle-class people overwhelmed by the consequences of “the unabashedly selfish, terminally competitive, winner-take-all philosophy that has steered U.S. policy for most of the past 40 years.” In Minneapolis, he finds Mercedes Gorden, a 38-year-old former corporate employee who, after her car plummeted more than 60 feet into the Mississippi River in the I-35W bridge collapse of 2007, has spent most of the last seven years learning how to coexist with debilitating pain; in Bushwick, Brooklyn, Jessica Gallardo, a teenager becoming ill with exhaustion from a night-shift bakery job that tenuously keeps her family from homelessness, but makes it impossible for her to function in high school; in Bridgeport, Conn., Guntars Lakis, an unemployed architect who, upon realizing he could not afford Italian ice for his daughters after their soccer practice, is awash in a wave of shame. Such individuals, living out what Herbert calls “America’s new normal,” include Rahn Harper, from Columbus, Ohio, who, after losing his $64,000-a-year job for a subsidiary of General Electric, got to the point of selling his blood.

Herbert doesn’t delve deeply into the lives he encounters; these people are neither solely the problems they are suffering nor metaphors in service of a premeditated point. They are case studies that he respectfully submits. He is building a policy argument, and he gives us what we need to know, plain and square.

“‘Infrastructure’ may be the least sexy word in the English language,” he writes. Then he opens his book right there, with Mercedes Gorden, absorbing the fact that the bridge she is driving on is falling apart. Were Herbert on that bridge, it’s hard to imagine he’d have been surprised. He is not wide-eyed nor attached to delivering the latest amazement. He’s a student of his sources and of history, and he’s a responsible one. He’s attended the conferences and read the census data and the National Transportation Safety Board reports. He’s interviewed the academics who are studying the links between inequality and social isolation; he’s researched the trauma of modern warfare, the underfunded veterans’ programs and rising rates of suicide. There’s no dazzle in the prose, no thrum to the accruing devastation, although Herbert’s anger has a healthy pulse.

This is not a showy book. It’s a book directed at the mind, not the heart. It assumes our interest in wanting to understand how we got here. This assumption is another expression of Herbert’s focus on the long-term view. He sees the connection between the perpetual assault on the poor and the newer incarnation of that assault on the middle class. He is quietly sorting the new pile of wreckage, the aftermath of what George Packer’s “The Unwinding” captured, stunningly and gloriously, in the midst of the very same storm.

The newest refugees from the American dream, however, are stunned. Their inability to connect their ruin with their lowlier brethren is something I wish Herbert could have examined more. But they are new to this environment of vulnerability. At the bridge collapse, onlookers, he reports, “tended to feel that the disaster was inexplicable.” It took Steve Swindell, a former executive at Pfizer, quite some time to assimilate what had happened to him, even though it had been going on for years. When he updates Herbert that he’s now working at a low-wage job at Trader Joe’s, Herbert writes, “he stopped for a moment, as if still absorbing what he’d just said. ‘I was in a leadership role at Pfizer,’ he went on, ‘and this is what I’m doing now.’ ”

The evidence Herbert accumulates shows that the disasters were, in fact, foreseeable — in light of our shortsighted approach to our basic needs, perverted by false choices imposed by the elite’s boundless greed. Countless bridges need attention — between people and spaces. “The collapses were caused by one or more of the following: design flaws, bridges built on the cheap, poor maintenance and lousy upkeep, repairs put off until another day,” he writes. The book is filled with such unadorned sentences of important information. “The simple truth is that bridges fall down because of an unwillingness to spend the money that is necessary to build them properly and keep them in good repair.” Engines burn out if you don’t keep putting oil in your car.

Herbert, blessedly, is not interested in the exceptions. He attacks the addiction to this narrative most artfully in his characterization of billionaire entrepreneurs and their invasion of public schools. But he’s not interested in exceptionalism mainly because it’s a useless frame when you are concerned with the majority. Winning against the odds ignores the fact that most people are losing, and Herbert is, rationally, worried about them.

In one of the more moving sections of the book, we do meet an exceptional young man: Dan Berschinski, 24 years old in 2009, a recent graduate of West Point, on the first month of his first tour as a lieutenant in Afghanistan. He loses both his legs in a roadside bomb. His very survival is a miracle. It is due partly to a remarkable family that is able to stay at his bedside, aiding overworked nurses, suctioning some of the 16 tubes moving through their son every 15 seconds — every 15 seconds — again and again. Berschinski defies the doctors’ expectations that he’ll never walk again, and his method of rehabilitation becomes a model for other legless vets. We leave him with his girl, en route to Stanford to acquire an M.B.A. American readers love stories like this. But in Herbert’s working hands, one is left with a sense of trepidation and the wild, criminal waste. What, exactly, is inspiring about a corrupt war resulting in an exceptional young man spending years of his life learning to walk again?

The dreams of ordinary people aren’t big ones. Mercedes Gorden wants “to have a child and a happy life and to raise our child well.” Jessica Gallardo wants to finish high school and to make sure her family has a place to live. Bob Herbert wants us to take an active interest in our collective fate.

It is significant that he has left the powerful perch of this very powerful newspaper to devote his attention to even more sustained explorations of the serious issues that have obsessed him. He knows plenty that we don’t, and he also knows what’s possible because he’s out there, talking to people, reading the boring reports, documenting what he sees.