Brace For Impact

The Really: Is 2009 the year we need to "brace for impact?"

Perhaps I am missing the good cheer that approaches Barack Obama's Inauguration Day . The sense of relief I feel at this milestone does not translate to any form of euphoria.

Having been through a few economic downturns in our lives we are astonished that no matter the evidence, people we will resort, out of all kinds of fear, to making amazingly horrible decisions.

It generally starts out with a class stratification:where those doing financially okay will look at those having a hard time as somehow morally and intellectually deficient. The sneers and catty comments work their ways into conversations of those not yet touched. They take solace that it couldn't happen to them and it must be these other people's problem. Like very sick patients the people caught in the first wave of pain also assume it is their fault and understand they will be shunned by those not wanting to catch the disease.

Of course the fact is that most people can't sustain the economic downturn for more than six months to a year is lost on some who insist that it must be THEIR OWN FAULT.

As the deep recession continues (or as we like to call it the NEW DEPRESSION) it widens to those who were not first touched and those begin to see their worth disappear. Suddenly real fear sets in and strange attempts at ostrich-like behavior appear. The bunker mentality takes over and people start hoarding prepared foods and in many parts of the country bullets.

The notion that we "all hang together or hang separately" is lost in all sorts of bad behavior and though the solution was there all along (let us struggle together to make it through) it is lost in the looks on the faces of the folk as they jockey for position.

In the terrific Spielberg movie Empire of the Sun the boy who has survived a Japanese concentration camp is asked what he has learned after he is freed: "People will do anything for a potato," he says.

I spoke recently with someone who lived through The Great Depression and asked them what it was like. They said, "It was sad."

Brace for impact.