The Great Rupture
By PETER S. GOODMAN
Published: July 2, 2010

IN a musty coffee shop in the suburbs of Portland, Ore., a dozen people occupying scruffy couches peer into laptop computers, their screens casting a blue glow across pasty faces. They scroll through online job listings, availing themselves of free Wi-Fi, as they pass another drizzly afternoon in the temporary office of the age.

You run across this scene in town after town these days, from doughnut shops tucked into strip malls in Charlotte to vegan cafes in Austin. It has become commonplace, along with possessions piled curbside in front of foreclosed homes. Here is gloomy evidence of a national hunger for paychecks, fresh sign of the everyday calamity coloring much of the American experience.

And yet the same scene suggests the endurance of a psychic strength that Americans like to claim for ourselves, at least in the mythologized version of our history: Hard times create a collective response. The worst economic downturn since the Depression, its depth underscored by weak job numbers released Friday, has turned coffee shops into grassroots unemployment offices. People exchange tips on who is hiring and where to post résumés. They watch one another’s belongings. They share limited electrical outlets, rationing resources in the sort of mutually beneficial fashion that typically eludes elected representatives in Washington.

Over the past three years, as I have explored the downturn’s consequences in hard-hit areas of the country from the Pacific Northwest to South Florida, I have been struck again and again by the contradictions at play, competing visions of division and solidarity. Two hundred and thirty-four years into an American experiment launched in the name of the common good, it often feels, to me on the road, as if a battle is underway for the nation’s identity, a jockeying over the values that will govern whatever follows the Great Recession.

A great many people have lost faith in powerful institutions, from Congress to Goldman Sachs. Yet beneath the bitterness coloring national affairs — down at the level of neighborhood, family, coffee shop, tavern — a tenuous belief in the collective good remains, perhaps moderating national dismay.

Who are we? This question has grown resonant as Americans try to secure satisfying answers for themselves, reclaiming identities stripped by the downturn. The recession turned creditworthy homeowners into delinquents and commuting professionals into the jobless.

“I just want to get my life back.â€