I’ve just had an odd thought.
Suppose I had been born in 1999, much as my father had been born in 1899. To make this work, let’s say my father was my great great grandfather.
Right now, assuming I was still alive, I would be 71 and the year would be 2071.
Now if you had asked me 60 years ago what things would be like as I neared the end of my life (or the curtain call as I like to refer to it), I would have just looked as you and shrugged.
If you come up to me today, and ask me what things will be like 60 years from now, I will still just look at you and shrug. At least there’s some things that never change.
My ex asked me about a month ago how long the great depression lasted. Now it’s hard to put dates on something as ephemeral as jobs and the value of money. But basically the depression began with the crash of Wall Street, loss of approximately a quarter of our jobs, and ended when women took war-related jobs and the men in the military returned at the end of World War II.
Okay. I know that wouldn’t pass muster on Wikipedia, but if you want more details, that’s where you’ll have to go.
Look at it this way. We’re cruising down the road at 60 miles an hour while talking on our cell phone. We look up and we’re three feet from a car that’s stopped in front of us. There’s not even time enough to say “Oh, shit!” That’s how close we are today to the second and perhaps even greater depression.
“You must remember this, a kiss is just a kiss, a sigh is just a sigh” as laid out in As Time Goes By, music and lyrics by Herman Hupfeld and featured in the movie Casablanca (1942). Well, you also need to remember that greed is always greed. It brought on the first depression and it’s bringing on the second “supersized” depression. Cons, lies, and deceits, the stuff that will bring down the even toughest economy.
And blind alleys, blind theories, and blind ends will not get the economy put back together again. We’re all in this together. You’ve already heard it. Now believe it.
So the first depression lasted approximately 15 years. The US tried to turn it around and to many, the name Franklin D. Roosevelt is starting to take on a new meaning but, after creating the WPA (Works Progress Administration) along with other somewhat successful but mostly unsuccessful projects, and throwing boodles of money at the dilemma (sound familiar), Roosevelt could not solve the problem and it took 15 years and a the war to end all wars to finally turn things around and bring a prosperity to this country that, with a few hiccups, has lasted well into the 1990’s.
History is definitely a teacher, but an old and somewhat infirm one. But if we listen to history, probably one quarter of my fictitious life from now to 2070 will be spent in a monetary depression. If history is reliable, a Big Mac could go as low as five cents and that’s supersized. In the 1930’s my father got paid ten dollars a week and could buy what he would call “a dandy dinner” for five cents.
As money freeze, banks merge or close, and jobs dry up, the price of things deteriorates or they sit around like a parking lot full of used cars, waiting for a buyer who never shows up.
So all I can say from my perspective is “slow down” and “take it one day at a time.” Futurist George Orwell missed the call in the book 1984 and Arthur C. Clarke again failed in 2001. If I was given the power to start over, what adventures in what kind of world would I go through getting to 2071.
And say that I finally got there, what would the place look like?
- Bob