Pressure

I’ve been spending some time on Facebook recently, and today I changed my status to “Ben was happier when all we had to worry about was the Russians nuking us.” I meant it as an off-hand remark, but the more I think about it, the more it sort of sums up how I feel now.

I grew up during the waning years of the USSR - back when the thought of a nuclear attack was still a concern, but much less likely. America was strong - nobody was really a threat to us, and those who were a threat (the Iran hostage crisis) weren’t really something that everybody worried about. The economy was booming - except for the S&L failure, which didn’t seem to affect my seven year old self or my family at all. The only thing that I noticed from that was that a former bank branch became a Chinese restaurant.

9/11 happened, and the economy slowed. I got laid off from VPI and spent the remainder of the summer and fall in an alcoholic haze with Jay, not doing much besides sending resumes, surfing Monster, and playing paintball in the woods on Fischer Boulevard behind Mugsys. There was the threat of the “next attack on American soil” which sort of hung over like a specter, but even then did not really keep me up at night. I suppose that, had I lived or worked in New York in September of 2001, or had I known anybody who died in the WTC attacks I might have felt differently.

Seven years later there’s still the threat that terrorists pose. We also have Iran which may or may not be building a nuclear device which certainly would be used to attack America. The news today is that North Korea is taking the seals off their reactors and that they don’t care about being labeled a state that supports terrorism. It’s either a negotiating point or another vector of attack for people who don’t like America.

The headlines are all screaming about the economy. Giant banks - the pillars of the American economy - are teetering near collapse. AIG was just bailed out. There’s a $700B plan stalled in Congress to “rescue” the economy that is being drawn up by the same people (Republicans and Democrats) who were incompetent enough to let the country get to this point. My house has lost $50K in equity in the last year. Record numbers of houses are being foreclosed on. Record numbers of people (myself included) are one or two paychecks away from disaster. One of my friends who works construction has been out of a job for a month. There’s the ever present worry that the layoff I had in 2001 will repeat itself in 2008, and I’ll be scrambling to find some way to keep my head above water and pay the $1600/mo or something needed for COBRA.

My daughter is two and a half. She wakes up innocently each day, heads into the living room to play with her toys and watch cartoons. She knows nothing about the people in the world who wouldn’t think twice about blowing her up with a car bomb to make a political statement. She knows nothing about the impending collapse of the economy, the lowering value of the house, or the rising prices of groceries.

I have to wonder if the world is getting more complicated (and dangerous), or if my perception of all of the bad things going on is just increasing as I get older. There hasn’t been a day that goes by in the last two weeks that I haven’t worried about the future - the collapse of the economy, and the very real threat that myself and my family could be homeless and standing on a soup kitchen line with hundreds of other people. I don’t know if I can blame the situation in the world on Bush (which would be a convenient label to stick on everything) or if it’s just the inevitable conclusion of the way things have been headed for generations and generations.

All that I know is that I am terrified of the future.

Tags: economy