Tom Englehart's "Living in the Ruins: My depression ... or ours?"
Basically he's asking if this financial crisis signals "the big one" and if so, what does that mean?
In these last days, I've thought some about my parents, about their whole generation which lived through the Great Depression, those fathers and mothers who had a "depression mentality" for which we, the young growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, had no patience, and about which we had next to no curiosity whatsoever. I sure didn't anyway. That was so past. Despite the good times, they feared otherwise.
It's unnerving when history becomes yours, when no one can tell you where the bottom is, or what life will be like after that bottom is reached. It's one of those moments when you discover why overused phrases -- I think here, for instance, of "through a glass darkly" -- were overused in the first place.
There is so much, much more.
4 comments:
Excellent article, albeit depressing.
There's an air of calm that just doesn't make sense to me. In fact, it's quite alarming. Too much of a this too shall pass attitude. When such financial crisis hit Asia or Latin America in the past, the media and our leaders described it as ruin and disaster but not so much when it happens to us. I don't get it.
Y'know, I think those countries recovered rather quickly, though I don't think things have ever been the same.
Argentina's gotten some pretty impressive growth since their currency collapse, but I don't know how things are for the majority.
If it happens at the centre though, here in the G-8, no other economy is big enough to help get us out.
No, no other economy could help us out, but I'm not sure that we'd want to anyway. I race backwards to the same way of conducting ourselves seem to me to be insane on its face. The question for me is whether we have the political and social wherewithal to weather the adjustment.
Are we too bound to a certain expectation of the world to recognise when it is no longer valid? Would we keep trying to recreate what we lost? Would a regional populist emerge, from say Alberta, and disrupt any national planning?
Y'know that's true Boris. I was just thinking about people not being unemployed and destitute.
But we can't go back to business-as-usual, because that's what led us to this in the first place and it's completely unsustainable.
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