Cold New World: Growing Up in Harder Country [Paperback]

It doesn't take much to enjoy this book. It reads like four stories. I had to keep reminding myself that these were true (according to Finnegan). After the "stories," in which Finnegan tries to keep a journalistic distance (though not always), there is an epilogue, and we see what the author is trying to get the reader the see. There are deep questions of responsibility that run through America's laws and policies, that these questions must be asked by the citizens of the country who sometimes must choose between economic growth and economic equality. Such consideration requires an understanding that some decisions allow a few to prosper and few to fall into deprivation.

It's easy to say people like Terry and Juan are hopeless, that they will forever be in trouble, and that they deserve any punishment they get. It's a little harder to say that when you consider that you have human beings in desperate conditions, and they will not go away simply by enforcing judicial toughness.

Mr. Finnegan has an uncanny ability to arrive in a completely strange town and somehow immediately bond with perfect strangers who confide in him, ask him to dinner, and if necessary let him bunk down and move in. This "intimacy" gene resides in the authors of "Cold Blood" and "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil." If you and I were in that strange town, we would be lucky to get directions to the nearest gas station, let alone an invitation for dinner.

If you automatically assume this underclass exists only in the inner-city ghettos, your comfort level is going to go way down. The subjects ranged from New Haven, CT, east Texas, central Washington state, and a suburb of Los Angeles. All of the youngsters had bleak, dangerous, unfocused lives. Their intelligence ranged from average to highly superior, their connection to their schools was tenuous or non-existent, their ambitions and dreams were either unrealistic or pitifully cynical. They seem to know far better than their parents that the road to the middle class is not a broad, welcoming boulevard, but an almost unreachable goal.

Supportive, loving, responsible families do not appear to be the panacea we are all led to believe. Juan admires, approves and loves his parents; he just believes their lives have nothing to do with his. Sadly, he is right. Mindy has a strong, loving mother who cannot fathom the world Mindy is almost forced to live in. The lack of impact of a strong family shocked me.

The author pulls no punches and in his summary states, "What price are Americans willing to pay for social peace? This seems to me a central question. We jail the poor in their multitudes, abandon the dream of equality, cede more and more of public life to private interests, let lobbyists run government. Those who can afford to do so lock themselves inside gated communities and send their children to private schools. And then we wonder why the world at large has become harsher and more cynical, why our kids have become strange to us. What young people show us is simply the world we have made for them."

This is a worthwhile, hard-hitting book. It will stay with you. You won't easily forget Terry, Lanee, Juan and Mindy.

Finnegan does not deny that a conspicuous minority of our younger citizens are finding themselves fabulously fortunate, preoccupied with drowning themselves in the material excesses too many of us wallow in, but it is to the other, less-chronicled segment of the twenty-something generation that he brings his considerable talents and insights, and he weaves a fascinating, fulsome, and frightening narrative around a series of personal anecdotes and experiences of teenageers and young adults trapped by life circumstances and poverty into lives that give the thoughtful reader pause. According to the author, a new, more rigid, and less fluid socioeconomic class system is emerging that makes the old and more tradition notions of rugged individualism look like a overly generous social welfare state. And we all know it was hardly that.

Finnegan spent a great deal of time with families in a number of different communities across the country, and became an intimate observer to the kinds of futile and often desperate attempts to become participating card-carrying members of the increasingly elusive American Dream. His is a terrific and absorbing look at the issues of race, ethnicity, social class, and social change as it is rapidly evolving in contemporary American culture, and the author never loses sight of the basic humanity of each of his subjects or their struggles to gain the material success and security so often portrayed in the electronic media they watch incessantly. Those he writes about are always dealt with in compassionate terms, recognizing individual complexities and talents that belie their poor educational experiences and lack of opportunities. We recognize the subjects as intelligent and multi-faceted people, and empathize with their frustrating existential situations.

This is a book one finds fascinating to read, in spite of its gloomy assessment of the reality of life in the "not-so-toni" barrios and exurbs surrounding the cities. It is an extremely entertaining and edifying book, a poignant and intelligent excursion into the heart of America's expanding impoverished underclass, and a well-focused peer into the unpromising future for millions of youngsters and twenty-something adults just now entering the job market with so few skills and very little hope of climbing out of their own desperate life circumstances. The book is a must-read for anyone thinking that Michael Harrington's "Other America" has melted away in under the prevailing influence of the financially sunny 1990s, and I recommend it as a book representing a more comprehensive national perspective regarding the need for government action to provide more opportunities and a variety of appropriate training programs for such disenfranchised Americans. As John Kennedy once said, if we cannot reach out to help the most humble and wretched among us, then there is little hope to save the fortunate few.