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The Not-So-Great Depression

My grandmother told me many stories about the Great Depression; it happened when she was a teenager and she remembers it well. Her extended family lost everything they had when the banks went bust and they had to move in. Aunts and uncles and cousins under one roof, to barely make ends meet.

This recent financial crisis has not affected me so deeply as the Depression affected Nana. Young Nana was headed to college at NYU, studying to become an art teacher, when the crisis hit. She was forced to drop out and join the workforce as a secretary. Education had become a luxury.

I had heard that Washington Mutual was going down a few months ago, but that they were trying to keep it under wraps. Now Wachovia’s downfall is being buzzed about. Is Citibank next? What about my bank?

All I know is I (thankfully?) don’t exceed the amount of FDIC insured money sitting in my bank, but if I did, I would be confused and angry. I am confused and angry, but mostly because I look into the future and I see a lot of question marks.

Luckily, unlike Nana, I have already been able to go to college and graduate. Mostly due to Nana and Papa’s generosity with the hard-earned money they carefully saved over the years after the Depression. I have always been frugal, and I work from home, where the cost of gas prices is kept at arm’s length.

But the question remains, in the “richest” and most privileged nation in the world, how have we mishandled things so badly?

I feel as if I belong to a neighborhood club where we have been collectively putting our money in the pot slowly, in order to save up to send my (as yet unborn) children to college, or to help my neighbor’s sick kid afford a surgery, or to finally fix those potholes on my street. And one day I’ve woken up to find that the President of our club, who I thought was one of us, has spent all of our hard-earned money on booze and hookers and a Lamborghini.

So much for college, health, and civic maintenance. Am I out of line?

As a young person with a long future ahead of me, a long future of working, paying taxes, saving money, taking out loans, having children, and someday, very far from now, retiring: I am concerned.

There are a lot of young people like me out there who need something to believe in and need to believe our government and the financial systems they oversee have our best interests at heart.

Right now I just feel like my parents took my piggy bank on a field trip while I was sleeping, and shattered it into a million irretrievable pieces.

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