Rage and Panic

If you can keep your head
when all about you are losing theirs,
you probably just don't understand
the gravity of the situation.

Few things are more disorienting than suddenly finding that things were not what they seem. Walking in the dark and discovering in the most shocking way possible that that shadow on the ground was really a swimming pool, for example, or saving diligently for many years only to see the value of your 401K evaporate almost overnight.

It's pretty dismaying, too, to see Americans whipped into a violent rage by demagogues wielding innuendo, slander and fear. That was supposed to happen "elsewhere" - in benighted foreign lands without our advantages and traditions. The root, though, is fear. Seeing your job, retirement, or living crumble before your eyes is much more profoundly disorienting than that cold night splash in the pool.

In that disorientation of panic, it's all too easy to turn that fear into rage, and unscrupulous politicians have always been quick to turn that rage and fear to their advantage. That's what happened in the former Yugoslavia, in Rwanda, in Nazi Germany, and that's what has been happening the present political campaign.



As in most cases of Doom Foretold, there really are people to blame: greedy bankers, lax regulators, politicians too cozy with lobbyists, and cocky economists who were sure that they had the tools to fix anything that might go wrong. The web of guilt is wider too: anybody who got used to living on cheap borrowed money is a direct contributor to the problem, because it is the sudden disappearance of that cheap borrowed money that translates the financial crisis down to the real, mainstreet economy.

Unfortunately that's a wide web indeed, including banks, global corporations, small businesses, individuals who used their mortgages as piggy banks, and, above all, the government.

"Reagan proved deficits don't matter" said Cheney. He also supposedly proved that understanding what the hell was going on was a luxury in the Nation's chief executive. Reality always has its revenge though, and now we and our children get to live through it.

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