A Hard Rain is Gonna Fall

My next door neighbors are watching Chinese television. I self-consciously look up from time to time for a peek at them as they stare at Chinese news learning of the country they once fled. I watch with admiration and a thimble full of envy. Three generations under the same roof anxious to learn if anything had changed. The head of the family is known as the most competent builder in the Oakland Hills of California.

I am packing to return to Texas for a few weeks. My learning curve will be intense, but I don't know it yet. The lesson begins when the cab driver pulls up in my driveway.

The cabbie is from Africa. He says he is one of the few thousand allowed to come to America from Ethiopia because of U.S. State Department lotteries. He drew a lucky number. In the short ride to the airport it's clear he's funny, smart, and grateful for my business. He loves America, but during the ride he complains about Iraqi cab drivers at Oakland Airport. He says they take prayer breaks and consider that part of their job. "We all wait in line for the next fare, why cannot they?" he wonders. The practice of praying on the job and then cutting in line is not fair, he says. I tell him they are new immigrants, and they'll get the hang of things soon. He laughs and says he sure hopes so. He says he wants them all to be friends.

Arriving in Austin, the first kind face to great me is the African American hotel desk clerk who welcomes me with a warm smile and self confidence I rarely witnessed in African American men his age when I was growing up. He is the level head at the reception desk. We begin talking about the local headline in the newspaper.

Dell computers was laying off eight thousand eight hundred employees world-wide and the Austin area was about to get a high voltage jolt of present day reality. I ask the elderly gentleman about Dell and the fallout.

"Nine hundred jobs gone from here," he says. "Gone, just like that." He raises both shoulders and both arms in a gesture of empathy for those injured by this evolving global market affecting all our lives. It will be a hard hit for the local economy. Realtors quoted in the paper said residents fear they will have to sell their homes for the price of the remaining mortgage.

"Yep," I say. "Dell has a history of making hay while the sun shines and skippin' town when the going gets tough and the taxes get too -- well, taxing." I had read that Dell has moved plants to China, Ireland, Africa and India, just to mention a few countries with low paid workers and few labor unions. Apparently Poland is desperate for jobs now, so Dell is expanding there.

With fewer jobs, anger was running rampant through the psyches of those in the Austin area. It is anger born of fear and the inevitable by-products followed. Fear leads to arrogance. Fear leads to bullying. Fear leads to military buildups. Fear inflates egos and Texan egos are already legendary. Besides the size of the state itself, the oil industry made a lot of self- indulgent billionaires. Tennessee Williams would have had a wealth of good material here. Remember the television series Dallas in the eighties? Remember J.R?  But that was then: this is now.

My next stop is the 7-11 store owned by an Iraqi man who is itchy and anxious and his fingers never leave the cash register. He nearly jumps out of his skin when a group of Mexican day workers come in to purchase some sub-par nourishment for dinner. Some have worked as illegal labor all day mowing lawns and working construction. Their eyes are dark and tired and their clothes are worn. I stare at the calluses on their hands. They are hard workers. No one disputes that.

I begin the drive to my sister's home in Marble Falls, Texas, about an hour-and-a-half away. When I pull over for lunch I see a nail salon. Inside are about twenty mostly underage female workers from Thailand waiting to scrape the dirt from underneath the toenails of women with thick southern accents and big hair. The young women watch like abused animals for glances of displeasure from the clients. If the boss sees a dissatisfied customer, I get the impression the consequences could be grave.

Back on the road, I remember I have forgotten my e-mail ticket home and call United Airlines for help. I cannot understand the ticket agent on the other end of the line. He is in India.

I pull over thinking the connection must be bad, and if I can get out of traffic, and turn off the engine, I will be able to hear. There is a delay on the phone line that is so frustrating we spend the first few minutes in bizarre overlapping conversations that sound much like talking on a two-way radio. Is it the distance or the phone companies recording the conversations at the U.S. government's request? Reluctant admissions of such events had recently been made.

Either way, after five minutes of trying to understand one another, I eventually feel as if my brains are about to explode and exit via my eye-balls. I begin screaming at the ticket agent who is trying to help me as he sits in what I imagine to be a cheap fabricated cubicle near a busy road in New Delhi. I hear loud diesel fuel vehicles passing by. I am crazy with impotence. No matter how frustrated he is, it does not show. He has a script he has been taught to follow, and he is unflappable as long as the answers are in the script.

"I need my reference number," I speak much too loudly and condescendingly into the phone. I wait for the pregnant pause to pass so I can hear his answer.

"Yes, ma'am, your number is R-ruh, P-uh, R-ruh." At this point I am torn between the liberal guilt I feel for being angry and the impulse to break the phone into little pieces by assaulting the dashboard with it.

I finally ask for his supervisor. His voice raises several octaves. "Am I not pleasing you ma'am? If you will hold on, I will get another agent." I remember my manners and say, "No, let's try one more time." He begins again. This time the combination of numbers and letters contains what I think he is calling a "B." I'm not sure, so I stop him for the umpteenth time.

"Is that a 'B' as in bunny or a 'P' as in pony?" He is off script now and therefore completely lost. I finally ask him to hang on a moment. I let the phone go limp from my hand into my lap and wait a few moments while fighting back tears of frustration. I pick up the phone and spend another ten minutes pulled over on the loud busy roadway trying to understand this very kind, patient man who most likely considers his job a blessing from God.

I cannot wait to get back to Northern California. When I finally do, I stop by my favorite coffee shop in Oakland run by a Cambodian woman whose life story is too horrible to share. She will only say the Khmer Rouge "hurt her family."

I want to get to my house and spend as much time there as possible. I am considering selling it, but the "downturn in the economy," is in full swing in my neighborhood, and it is not a good time to sell. I manage a smile as I think of my southern brother saying, "All Californians ever do is brag about the cost of their real estate!"

I begin asking a friend at the coffee shop how homes are selling. A realtor within ear shot of our grievances about our nest eggs getting fried chimes in. "Advertise in Dubai, the new financial capitol of the world...there are plenty of millionaires there who will buy a home here!"

When I finally walk through my front door, I go directly to my Dell computer. It's dead, and showing no signs of life. I call the help line and reach India. As usual, a very well-mannered man answers, ready to walk on hot coals to help me.

There is a sea change occurring in America and we are now a world connected, whether we like it or not. So we must ask ourselves, how can we survive? Is there a way to build bridges? How can we take this potentially explosive mix of chaos and find the promising essence of it?

Will we react by alienating some? Will America become isolated? Will America create more wars in order to remain a "Super Power" while the country is run by third world workers? Or will America re-invent itself and raise diplomats and economists and entrepreneurs and react with wisdom? Will pragmatism win over nationalism?

A hard rain is falling, as Bob Dylan sang. Will America's great thinkers gather the droplets and be part of a bountiful bouquet, or will the nation become dehydrated, and stuck in archaic thinking that could lead to continual drought?