By Alexander Zaitchik
Like most people I know in their 20s and 30s, it takes a stretch of the imagination to understand that I have a stake in the national economy.
In a literal sense, the financial meltdown has hit me close to home. The smoking ash piles on Wall Street lay just a 10-minute walk from my front door in New York's Chinatown. But my sense of proximity to events stops there. In terms of their impact on the soundness of my sleep, at least so far, the economy in question might as well be North Korea. My feeling of remove from the crisis is a product of the fact that I don't have much to lose. Like millions of Americans, I own nothing -- not property, not stock, not a 401(k) plan, not health insurance, not a car, nothing.
Like most people I know in their 20s and 30s, it takes a stretch of the imagination to understand that I have a stake in the national economy. In terms of day-to-day life, my only ties to large financial institutions are a Bank of America checking account, a single low-limit high-fee Visa card, and a Kilimanjaro of student debt, which I have come to accept as something I will die with, not from, like a benign but grapefruit-size tumor or peaceable parasite dwelling in my large intestine. When people use scary terms like "unchartered territory" and "total meltdown," my first thought is, "Would an economic cataclysm wipe out my student debt? If so, then let's press reset and start the whole damn thing over! Burn it clean!"
I haven't heard much from or about people like me in the last month. Watching the media report on the crisis, you'd think the United States had achieved the Republican dream of becoming a full-fledged "ownership society" populated by an upwardly mobile class of home-owning day traders sitting on fat nest eggs. But it hasn't. So here's a news flash from the young-and-indebted demographic: Those of us without retirement plans or health insurance, who just barely make rent and buy food in the real economy, a lot of us aren't as scared as maybe we should be. We have our own gut take on the disappearance of $9 trillion in electronic NYSE casino chips. And that is, we could give a shit.
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