Beggars Would Ride
Sharon May 14th, 2009
At the end of last year, I predicted that by the end of this year, the US would have experienced an economic collapse into a deep Depression. Despite the rhetoric about bottoms and “green shoots” my own take is that we’re on target for that outcome – the realities of losing millions of jobs through the auto company bankruptcies (now inevitable, at least in the case of Chrysler and GM), the hundreds of thousands of teachers and state employees on the chopping block, and the expected losses, which even the IMF’s conservative estimates mark as stunning, combined with the deep economic crisis of the states and declining tax revenues and massively increasing deficits means that it is very unlikely that we’ve seen anything like a bottom.
Indeed, my 2009 predictions suggested that the rally brought about by a new president and completely irrational exuberance would probably last until mid-summer – if anything, I may have been too optimistic (not something I get accused of a lot 
). I still may well be wrong about this – others will tell us that we’ll see a recovery. But I find it very hard to believe we are not facing a major crisis, if not when I expected, not far after. The recent evidence linking the economic crisis to the oil price spike points out that when/if growth gets going again, we’re likely to see the same boom and bust cycle, only shorter.
Add to that the fact that I don’t see consumer confidence recovering soon – the reason being that price volatility and economic instability are not going away – whether oil crashes further (perfectly possible) or we see a short term recovery, price spike and collapse again, food prices are likely to remain volatile in a tight market, and people will never know for sure whether their heating bills, gas costs and grocery budgets will be small or large. That kind of economic instability undermines the desire to purchase – even if things seem to be getting better, as they seemed in April, consumers aren’t buying because they are afraid (correctly) of the next wave of instability.
The news that Medicare will be bankrupt in 8 years (and that figure is based on a sustained recovery – we can expect to see it shortened next year, I suspect) means that older consumers, who disproportionately hold the nation’s wealth, have even fewer reasons to spend – they now know they may be struggling on their fixed incomes with heating, gas and food costs, but also with more health care costs not covered by Medicare. Most baby boomers did not prepare for a future in which more or all of their health care costs have to be paid by them or through private insurance – they are already concerned about drug costs, for example, but Medicare’s economic instability means that they must expect to bear more of the health care costs themselves.
But this post is primarily not about what might bring about a major crisis (and right now I think we are in a minor crisis, although, of course, many people experience it as dire), but about the impulse to put it off just a little longer.
I do not speak here of an abstract impulse that I recognize in other people, but of my own desire to see events, if they are inevitable, delayed as long as possible. You might think I was immune to this, or that I even gloried in the idea of “ripping the bandaid off.” I’m not – I think like everyone else, I’m very fond of my comfortable life, and have no desire to face the unknown – and it is unknown, even given the amount of time I spend speculating about it. And what is not unknown, I do not anticipate mostly enjoying – while I have never lived through a Depression or economic collapse, none of my reading on the subject has left me with the impression that I will be delighted by the experience, even if eventually, in some measure we end up better off for our endurance. That which does not kill us may make it stronger, but evidence suggests that some of us do get killed, and I’m fairly content as a weakling, thank you very much.
All of which is just a long way of saying that when I see signs on the horizon that our constant running faster just to keep in place is starting to lose momentum, my immediate impulse is bargaining “just one more year!” I doubt that I’m the only one.
I find I want more time mostly for my children’s sake, although this implies a great deal of unselfishness, and right behind them are plenty of selfish motivations. I find I want my kids to grow older before they are faced with hardship – I don’t know if that is selfish or unselfish – I hope that perhaps while they are little, they will remain insulated from the worst in ways older children can’t. And yet, I want them to have as much of the good of modernity as they can before it goes away. Even if the easy life isn’t always good for them, I want it for them as a gift, and to fill them with good memories of good times.
I want my oldest son to get the enormous investments that our schools make in disabled children as long as he can – while if we have to, we will do what we need to for him, I have no doubt that we will fail miserably to replace his speech therapists and special education teachers. We will do what we can – but every year he can have those resources is one that gets him further.
I want these things selfishly for myself – I want the trips to visit family and the internet to roam (I don’t necessarily think all these things will disappear, but I’m not sure we’ll be able to afford them). I wan the pleasure of being a writer a little longer – it is still a new profession for me, and I do enjoy it. I want enough money to continue accumulating books and plants. Yes, I know I’ll be able to make do with what I’ve got. And that I don’t especially want to.
I want more security, more time of comparative affluence to put up the hoop houses and build a greenhouse, to get the herb business up and running and master more skills. And I want time for everyone else who needs those things – I want more time simply because I don’t want people I care about to be hurt. I think about all the people moving slowly, gradually, in their comfort zones, the ones who only just now see trouble on the horizon, and I want them to have time.
I want more time for all of us, sometimes badly enough to consider seriously – should I personally use my tiny influence on strategies that mostly just buy time, even at a price, so as to make this easier. Should I fix on strategies that allow us to adapt more smoothly, to move more by baby steps? I realize that I will not make policy, that for most people the choice is out of our hands, and yet, I still wonder what I should do, if it mattered?
I know that I will never have time enough. And the part of me that approaches this subject rationally (not that much, actually) recognizes that there is a compelling case for *not* wanting more time. Not because I want my predictions to be right, not because I want suffering, but because if we were to put the crisis off another ten years, we risk facing it further ecologically degraded, further down the energy curve, in a warmer, more dangerous, hungrier world, with fewer choices and resources for mitigation.
In the 1970s, when I was running around in pigtails, oblivious to the discussion, there was a great national discourse about the state of our ecology and resources. Nearly everything we know now, we knew then – that is, we knew in the 1970s that the oil would eventually run out, and indeed, many of the scenarios offered then have turned out to be surprisingly accurate. We knew by the late 1970s that Global Warming would be one of the great challenges of the 21st century. We knew that we were rapidly degrading our ecology. We knew it, and many courageous people tried very hard to push us to living our lives then as though these crises were immanent.
That we did not listen, that we chose to believe it was morning in America will turn out to be one of the great human tragedies of all time. In the 1970s, there was still time to shift our resources to renewables, time to build a sustainable economy, time to mitigate the worst of our climate shift. When I was a child and had no power to change things, when my parents stood in the place I am in now, holding the future for the next generation, the adults around me faced a real choice – and chose to put the issue off. I understand why they did so – it is hard to look to the future. I understand that many of them tried so very hard, and still grieve their failures. I understand. But I don’t want to be them.
I don’t know if it is possible to put off our crisis – I suspect in some ways it may be, in others, maybe not. But I cannot doubt that the choice to delay facing the crisis was a mistake, and a terrible, terrible mistake. So as badly as in some ways I want more time, I do not think it it right to allow that desire not to have to face the hard stuff to take root. In the end, the buck has to stop somewhere, someone has to take responsibility, not just for the problem, but for facing the crisis, and enduring it. I think we all will always wish someone else had done it for us. But that doesn’t give us the right to ask that of anyone else.
To the extent I can separate out what I wish for and what I believe will happen, I think in some measure, we are facing a crisis, and very soon. Whether it will be the beginning of something deeper, or just the first step down on a long flight isn’t clear to me. What is clear to me is that in the absence of a collective national movement to mitigation, that my wish that we have more time may be perfectly reasonable, but it isn’t an impulse I should give in to much. If we get it, we get it, and I won’t complain. But I am better off thinking “how will I go forward in a positive way from this moment” than in wishing.
Sharon