I come from strong stock. My parents were born in the 1920s to immigrant, semi-literate parents.  My parents were in their late 30s and early 40s when they had us.

They lived through the depression, the wars and made the galactic leap beyond the Lower East Side and Pelham Parkway (in the Bronx) to settle down in midtown Manhattan. We had all of the advantages and none of the handicaps of my parents’ and grandparents’ generations. My grandfather would shake his head — anything is possible in America.

We were raised to expect to work hard and succeed. Success was the inevitable end of hard work. You could miss Mother’s Day or a family celebration — even great uncle Lou’s retirement party — if you were working. (But you couldn’t miss a funeral or a shiva because even if you didn’t like the person alive, G-d forbid you wouldn’t pay your respects after the end. But I digress.)

Success was measured by your ability to give more to your children and community than your parents did. A Nobel Prize was not required but not off the table either, so to speak.

I can’t live up to my heritage. Why?  I am a formerly successful lawyer, whose practice continues to crater in the aftermath of the greatest economic meltdown since the Great Depression.

But failure is not an option. No matter what, we are responsible for our lives and fear of homelessness is good.

Fear is a motivator but hopelessness is the enemy. I try to imagine that I am the protagonist in a Robert Ludlum novel about an anemic looking, gray-haired, 40-something desk jockey — ok, work with me — who fights against the great evil of NO HOPE.  So call me Joan Bourne (Jason would be too butch).

I want my family to live in comfort and I want this world to be a better place for my having been born into it. But fighting the hopelessness is overwhelming.