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TechnoratiOur Sense of Troubled Normalcy Returns
A year ago, the panic was at full bore. October 2008 was the month in which the economic collapse seized the nation by the throat. After weeks in which Congress could not get a grip on the emergency (remember the frantic John McCain suspending his presidential campaign to ride to the rescue in Washington?), the $700 billion bailout bill was passed. Even so, the stock markets went into their steepest declines in decades, the gross domestic product registered its first drop in almost 20 years, and jobs fell off a cliff.
In early November, the economic news took second place to the astonishment of Barack Obama's election, but soon enough the word "depression'' began to define the fear even of the experts. In subsequent months, the rotating earth seemed to hesitate on its axis, as the global scale of the economic crisis showed itself. What was happening?
"The US economy has emerged,'' The New York Times reported Friday, "from the longest economic contraction since World War II.'' The GDP rose 3.5 percent. Stock markets have stabilized, and rising indexes seem predictable. The word depression has resumed its place in the diagnostic lexicon of psychology. Pillars of a new economic structure, like health care reform, are being nudged into place. Jobs remain a dark hole, the housing sector recovers in fits and starts, no one knows if the improvements will survive the expiration of stimulus funds, and some social wounds, like homelessness, show no sign of healing. But over all, last year's air of crisis seems a world away. Things are getting back to normal.
What did we learn? For all of our attention to the higher things, we were universally forced to confront the harsh fact of life that money matters a lot. The levels of fear caused by the evaporation of retirement accounts, failing banks, pink slips, fraud exposure, and the rank incompetence of so-called experts reminded us that the entire concept of credit, like the word itself, is based on the idea of faith.
Once faith is lost, there is no hope, and goodbye charity. It was not so much that, as Puritans complain, we put our faith in money, but that money is itself a token of faith. It is a symbol of an unspoken covenant that binds humans in a joint project of mutual protection and advancement - what we call "commonwealth.''
Money is the value we put on the effort each one expends at work. The good news this year - and the source of what recovery has occurred - is that most humans, however afraid, never stopped making that effort. Those who did stop, by and large, were forced to when they lost their jobs.
But money, it turns out, has an even deeper meaning. It is how we register the value of our time, and here is why the pins of money are so sunk into our psyches. To accumulate money, we seem to feel, is to accumulate time. To lose money is to lose time, which is the only thing keeping us alive.
The accumulation of time, we believe, is a way of fending off the end of time, which is death. Money offers an illusion of immortality. Even to put such a thought into words is to reveal its irrationality, yet nothing was made more dramatic in the last year than the "exuberant irrationality'' of our economic assumptions.
Things are getting back to normal? What if normal is the problem? The US economy is more shackled than ever to a military budget (a $700 billion bailout every year), which is money spent, for all its benefits, on death. Why is the gulf between haves and have-nots still the normal structure of economic order - or is that what our military budget aims to protect against?
And why, for that matter, does the growth of the economy still define normalcy when endless expansion, for all its benefits, inflicts a catastrophic cost on the environment? The coming collision between economic growth and global resource scarcity can already be foreseen. Chaos looms.
Can the resilience with which the human population has responded to this year's economic crisis shift now into a reckoning with its deeper warning? Life and death - there's the year's lesson: choose life.
11 Comments so far
Show AllSorry, y'all are gonna have to speak a little louder - got my head buried in this really cool new recovery sand...
Seriously - we are so back on the road to riches, like when things were 'normal' in... um... the 70s? 80s? Whatever - the point is, we're so, so back I told my boss to go f**k himself last night.
Whoo hoo! Now, those jobs jobs jobs are expected when, again...?
James Carrol, McCain wasn't the only candidate to suspend campaigning. Obama did too. He used the time to twist the arms of those who voted against the bailout the first time. He was successful as we shockingly found out. Although We the People called our representatives - 100 to 1 against the bailout - they voted for it anyway.
Voters: If you don't stop aiding and abetting these crooks by voting for them, all I can say is "you asked for it."
If voters are too timid to vote for a candidate who truly represents We the People and instead supports and votes for frauds and criminals, how can they expect Congress to do differently?
Grow a spine voters!
"Whenever we compromised, we lost." Arch Druid, David Brower
What strange writing...is he implying that narrowly escaping economic ruin should encourage movement toward a society not money-based? He seems to feel we have escaped, which I'm not sure I understand, as I see nothing but further financial devastation ahead...yet, he wisely speaks of chaos looming as a result of our economic head-on with enivronmental destruction...
If money is the value of our time, what is that same time worth without money? I feel the time I spend that does not earn money is the better part of my existence...what would an entire life lived in harmony with nature, yet generating not one unit of currency, be worth?
If our economy is killing our environment, does he recommend we stop our industrial and chemical shenanigans?
Money is the crap someone gives you when they don't want to give you something real...it is the buyoff, the brushoff, the never-quite-equal divvy...
it is the illusion of worth...not worth itself...
I read a pretty good book sometime back called "Your Money or Your Life". One of the main points of the book is that money represents your life's energy. You had to spend part of you life to get educated so you could get a job to earn it, then you have to work at a job to actually earn that money.
So when you equate money as representing your life's energy you look things a bit differently. For example how much of your life's energy do you want to expend to buy a fancy brand new car, as apposed to a cheap but reliable used one. It is an attempt at making people realize there is an actual cost to the limited time that they have on Earth. Are years and years of your life's energy spent to buy expensive junk in order to keep up with the Jones's really worth it in the end?
Another interesting point it makes is when the Banksters charge you 20% or 30% interest on your credit cards they are really stealing your life's energy. They are literally like real life Draculas, sucking your life's energy out of you for their use.
If people thought of it like that there would be even more rage against these creeps that there already is.
We might not get to choose.
What normal?
Unemployment arise.
Repos apace.
The debt rises faster than a million gas gauges.
Any "sense of normalcy" has come from advertising.
To lose money is to die. All of life's intrinsic aspects of beauty, love, bliss, compassion, [ oneness of being interpreted by mind] have been replaced with a piece of paper. Life has been reduced to psychic cannibalism and the real thing is not far off.
Carroll does what most generally miss. By proving that the US economy is tied to the military, he correctly points out that for most of us, it is very difficult to be 100% free of being tied to the military, directly or indirectly.
Some of us work for companies that do some or all business with the military or parts of it. Even those who don't work for such companies work for companies indirectly tied to the military or parts of it. It's all about business, like it or hate it.
The same thing goes with education. High school dropouts or college students whose parents are unable to afford college education allow their kids to sign up and some sign up because patriotism, some because of wanting to earn, some because they feel that they might not feel like a nobody anymore, and then there's just the ones who grew up wanting to have fun being a warmonger. I compare the VA Beach schools to the ones in Norfolk and I find out that the poorer schools do more business with military recruiters primarily to get the money to bail them out to avoid school shutdown. The downside of course is that they're essentially owned by the military like cancer. The other day, someone said schools need to teach basic communications skills to reduce violence. Well guess what? The military, controlled by the politicians and banksters, will want none of that in a school curriculum.
Even our buying powers can make a difference. I would like to see environmentalists selling at affordable for all prices environmentally friendly items and continue to make the case that everything that is made out of oil is of oil that we still from the wars we wage for oil. I don't want to have to do a dirty job just to be able to afford those expensive solar panels and water heaters.
Your ongoing willingness to rationalize continuing working at your military-industry tech job is evident again, max. Carroll talks about the economy's "shackle" to the military as an example of the huge problems our irrationality, weakness, and shortsightedness cause - NOT as an absolution for people like you to wriggle out of moral responsibility.
Your theme is professed helplessness, and moral action only when it's easy. You're helpless to find a job outside the killing industry, you have claimed in the past; that's ok because in your mind we're all tied at least indirectly to it. Then you segue into a comparison with the military-infested school systems - it's true, many of them are, but it's more of your defense, giving more examples of the military's power, by way of portraying yourself as powerless.
"Environmentalists" need to sell to you at the cheap oil-based prices you've been used to your whole life, so you don't "have to do a dirty job" to afford sustainable products. Right. It's all about them not making it easy enough for you, and about you being a martyr with your dirty job.
You're full of shit, max.
And by the way, I started a new tech job this summer at a law firm, good pay, challenging, good co-workers, in the shank of this depression. I was lucky to get all these things in one package at such a time. I live in a state with high unemployment. But tech jobs ARE AVAILABLE OUTSIDE THE MILITARY INDUSTRY, even if it means shifting sideways or a little down or learning something new. Don't try to use that as an excuse again.