A Good Depression

My Bangladeshi co-worker, who has lived in conditions I have only ever read about, questioned me the other day as to how I could look forward to a depression.

His perspective is shaped by his history, and to be sure, his living conditions in Bangladesh were certainly better than most of his comrades -- but consider Bangladesh compared to Elk Grove. Come on. No comparison. He was sincere in asking if I really thought that an economic implosion would be something to relish. It is nothing he relishes, considering his background -- living in an impoverished nation with 25 coups in 40 years, unstable currencies and unstable governments; he has no interest in seeing that here. Owning two cars and a new Natomas home, he's heavily invested in our consumer culture...but he hasn't forgotten his roots. We freely discuss politics, his religion (Islam) and our economy, and truthfully, he is much less absorbed in frenetic, wanton consumerism than are most other Americans, I think, because of where he came from.

I'll produce a list of 20 items I think would improve our people and our nation if we actually had to go through a depression. I will intentionally ignore the really bad shit that would likely happen during. I want to focus on the afterwards.

1) We'd become a nation with a common purpose again. We'd have the courage to rally, to protest, to force reform. Today we mindlessly and helplessly go about our consumer lives and can't force action on anything -- on our wars, on the economic bailouts, on any other social imperative, because we've completely lost our ability to question authority. A depression would spark outrage, and we'd force real reforms. The legislature of California wouldn't be fucking around with budgetary ideology and maintain their inability to govern if people en-masse were calling for their heads from the steps of the capitol.

2) Minimize our prowess for war. Good luck waging "wars on terror" when we're broke. Maybe we'll even stop our "war on drugs." Perhaps we'll realize potheads are nothing more that just potheads and not unrehabilitatable [sic] criminal felons. We'll save what remains of any wealth we might possess by not squandering it incarcerating a record number of people and fighting battles we can never win.

3) Maybe we'd offer sufficient reforms to stop this all this bubble bullshit. Oil bubbles, housing bubbles, tech bubbles, gold bubbles. Now I have no idea, not one, about what these reforms might look like, but if the end result is an economy that isn't entirely predicated on 4% growth at any cost, well, my gut feeling tells me that the bubble mentality would disappear. Along with this disappearance would be some of our American consumer lust for instant profits and rewards without effort.

4) You would actually have to save to buy...a brilliant concept! Perhaps we can forcibly remove ourselves from the shackles of consumer credit and perpetual debt. In my humble opinion, most of this current economic malaise was due to our culture of instant gratification. Change the culture, and you cure the major source of bubbles and busts.

5) Perhaps things might be built better, as if, say, they were intended to be used more than once before being shit canned. We might actually fix stuff again, and build stuff so that it doesn't have to be fixed.

6) We would again develop respect for the public realm, instead of all of our little private ones. We would again find value in public concerts, in meeting halls, in libraries, at the parks for barbecues and at the diamonds for pickup ballgames. We might even begin to realize that these things are more available to those who happen to live in correctly scaled human environments, not environments suitable for traveling by automobile.

I'm going to stop here, and develop the next 14 items during a follow-on post.