The outlook is bleak, but we've seen bleak before
Heading into 2009, the dismal state of the economy is making many of us sweat. A lot. But look back, and it's clear that mankind has survived much worse.
As 2009 arrives like a grizzly bear at a campsite, knocking down everything in its path and then eating the campers, I find myself strangely at peace. It's a peace that comes from knowing that millions of people have subsisted for years, and quite happily, while living in small grass huts and eating only berries and twigs.
And if they can do it. . . .
Like a lot of my fellow baby boomers, I've been sweating the economy and the stock market. Make that profusely sweating. The other day I was standing next to a friend, and some of his sweat leaped over onto me.
As Rodney Dangerfield used to say, it's rough out there.
Gallows humor dominates conversations with my 50ish and 60ish friends. Thoughts of retirement at 60 or 65 have been scuttled, replaced by prayers that we won't be laid off and can work until we're 80. Once-grandiose talk of "travel" now means taking buses when we're forced to sell our cars.
A generation that once romanticized communal life will now find out what it's like to live 14 to a house. It was much more appealing when everyone was 22 instead of 62.
The baby boomers are going baby bust. We'll become the Why Me generation, as in, "Why did those inept and greedy financial people have to pick this moment in history to destroy me?"
Financial doom is not certain, but it's certainly in play for 2009. Used to be that only crackpots forecast the imminent ruination of the U.S. economy and an uncertain length of time to recovery. Now, some respected economists are saying it.
People like me whose financial futures were linked to the stock market are now talking about Armageddon as if it were a real place, like Sea World -- minus Shamu.
We take note of the extreme measures that the politicians are talking about to fix the economy and, rather than being comforted, only grow more fretful as we grasp the severity of the problem. We re-read our Depression-era history and see that it took years for the economy to recover from these kinds of depths. We see friends and relatives losing jobs and forced to scramble for new ones that may not exist.
While recently lamenting the downward spiral of my financial status to a friend, he said not to worry, that everyone else was in the same situation. Oddly, that didn't soothe me.
