May You Live In Interesting Times
There is not an agreed consensus where this phrase comes from. Popular opinion says that its either a Chinese proverb or curse. Regardless, I find myself thinking it several times a day now. According to Rasmussen, 78% of Americans think that this country is on the wrong track. 78%. More than three in four.
This number is appalling. This number should be terrifying. This is the most tested the United States has found itself since the Second World War. While the Cuban Missile Crisis was a few days of terror, our current economic crisis has the feeling of a long, painful slide. Are we watching the inevitable decline of the American experiment?
What would have felt overly dramatic just a few months ago now feels frighteningly real. The largest single day drop in stock market history. Panicked politicians and political candidates are fueling this feeling of surreality with overly reassuring platitudes or end-of-the-world proselytizing. I can't ever remember feeling so unsure of my place in the world, or of the world in general.
My generation grew up during the prosperity and peace of the nineties. We grew up soft and pampered thanks to the excesses of our elders. We have come of age as the lifestyles we were promised have been gambled away. No one to blame. It is the collective fault of our consumptive society. This is the dilemma of our times.
Where do we go from here? Can we salvage what seems to be a descent towards societal fracture? It would seem histrionic if the past had not taught us that all empires must eventually fall. After a century of expecting collapse to come in an instant from nuclear holocaust, are we now instead to quietly slide into oblivion?
Yet, it feels like any other day. The sun will rise tomorrow morning and we will do our morning things. We will go to work like it was any other Tuesday. Is it though? May we live in interesting times. Indeed.
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Meredith Harris says:
Couldn't have said it better.
The past few weeks have left me with a deep feeling of unease, like my stomach is full of lead. In conversation about the financial crisis I compared the mortgage sector to maybe the 3rd or 4th level in the house of cards that is our economy - you take out that level, and all the cards above it fall, and the weight collapses much of what is built beneath it. I work in finance and understand enough to be concerned, but watching Brian Williams every night, all that is taking place just seems surreal.
Yet everyone, including myself, keeps telling themselves not to panic. I'm not panicking, because panicking feels... silly. I have that gut full of lead, but I ignore it, I write it off as my general anxiety and tendency to worry about everything under the sun. Most everyone I talk to agree that it is scary, but assure themselves it is going to be fine. It's all going to work out.
I am not sure if these mantras of reassurance to ourselves and each other are valid, or our inability to really comprehend a nation and a life so removed from what we have. I hope the former, but suspect the latter.