If you should go skating
On the thin ice of modern life
Dragging behind you the silent reproach
Of a million tear-stained eyes
Don’t be surprised when a crack in the ice
Appears under your feet.
You slip out of your depth and out of your mind
With your fear flowing out behind you
As you claw the thin ice. – Waters – The Wall
When I was young, my family’s house abutted a small lake in the back yard. On bright winter mornings, you could look out at the frozen expanse, bright sunlight glinting on a surface of limitless possibilities. We could tie on our skates and glide on the smooth surface, free, lucky to be middle class children in middle America: our lives seemingly stretched out before us bright and smooth, full of magic and freedom.
It was a man-made lake, a small dam holding back the water of a stream that gurgled through the slightly rolling hills of northern Illinois. It was shallow, and when the weather was changing, we had to be careful to test the ice before we stepped 
on it, lest it give way beneath you. I went through once, just to the knee — the blade of my skate stirring up the muddy bottom just off the shore. A strange feeling, that solidity suddenly disappearing, a terrible feeling of void opening up, followed by a laugh of relief shared with friends. Not too deep, of course, and people to help. Some hands grasping mine, a yank, and back on the smooth surface, sliding the last few feet to the shore, another winter ending, the pocked and etched ice no longer safe to enjoy.
Our economy, our society, is like that sheet of ice now, only the lake beneath us is dark and deep and seemingly bottomless, like the lakes that form at the bottom of the strip mines scattered throughout this country. Many of us, especially those in the ever growing number of those living in poverty, are out in the middle, on the thinnest ice. All it takes is the loss of a job, an illness, falling victim to a criminal or a natural disaster to send a splitting, booming CRACK radiating out beneath our feet, tossing us into the void waiting for us, and those we love, lurking beneath our feet.
This is the ugly truth of modern life in America, land of harsh judgements and a pathological belief in the power of the holy free market. More and more of us are left to fend for ourselves while political leaders rely on luck to fend off disaster. A huge number of people ARE the babies the Republicans want to drown in the bath water.
This is what we’ve voted for for over two decades. We’ve decided that we are no longer really a civil society, but a market. We’ve allowed our institutions to be corrupted by those same market forces: science has become merely opinion; laws are for sale to the highest bidders; elections are mere formalities to maintain the status quo; law enforcement isn’t there to serve us all, equal before the law, but to protect those with the most. This has always been the case for a certain extent, especially for the very poor, but it is increasingly true for more, and those in the once secure middle class stand shakily towards the edge, watching the cracks spread closer and closer the them.
Will we have the will, the decency, to form human chains to lay down on the fragile frozen water, to reach out to those slipping and frightened and drowning? Can we turn away from these decades of neglect and return to the project we started before Republican hegemony became the norm, to form a new social compact, to help our fellow citizens out of the freezing cold, to save them from sinking into the inky void?
As we look toward our leaders in so many of our broken institutions, the signs aren’t good. You can see and hear everyday Americans waking up, joining those who’ve fought for social justice, but progress is slow. We need a new commitment, before the cracks spread further, and all but the richest of us feel that terrible empty feeling of the pit opening up to swallow us all.
photo from MintPhotos, painting from MoserArt
