Being Afraid

I feel like my blog has betrayed some of my obsession with politics in recent posts. I don't know, just a nagging suspicion.

Watching as the S&P has downgraded the United States Credit Rating has been interesting. Part of it is because I am only vaguely aware of the complexities involved in international finance. But a much bigger part of it is because of the questions and reactions I have already begun to take notice of. Underpinning all of the observations and comments made about the last month has been a prevailing sense of anxiety and uncertainty.

The person with whom I am staying with in Denver asked me what I thought about the whole situation. After briefly talking about the childishness of the Congressional leaders who helped bring about this scenario, we also acknowledged how the material mentality of many people had likewise contributed to the serious problems of the economy. We touched on some fairly common themes; people bought houses they couldn't afford because the house is a symbol of success, credit has become the medium of purchase over the previous four decades, and the surplus of the Clinton era promoted an environment of reckless borrowing. Testing these assumptions empirically is not really my concern because it is the relative truth of these statements that is so interesting to me. My host was looking back on the last two decades and identifying a pattern of material and financial life that she had lived through. We concluded our discussion with her saying, point blank, "its all really scary."

I think, at the heart of all this anxiety, may be the fact that the uninterrupted "progress" experienced by the US has really hit a serious road bump. The progress I refer to is material consumption. An unyielding march towards more consumption and more purchasing with no hint of retreating. We have, in the United States, become accustomed to such a powerful array of purchasing opportunity and material diversity that it seems unimaginable that such prosperity could be eroded. I think people genuinely worry that their way of life will be reversed or perhaps lead to a steady decline in American material prosperity.

And news agencies demonstrate a concept that dovetails into this fear over material declination. NPR's headline as of today is "American Pride takes hit with S&P's Downgrade" The article quotes a professor of economics as saying "[the downgrade] is a way of saying that our government isn't working right now." I think this is certainly true. As James Loewen noted, there is a precedent in American education in history to believe that our government always does the right thing (see Lies My Teacher Told me Chapter 11). But the government did not do the right thing, and everyone can see it plainly. Already, government officials have retuned to political blame games and there is little hope, in my view, that these things will change any time soon. But when NPR refers to "American Pride" what exactly is the source of that pride? Certainly not a pride in our self-proclaimed values (values which many of us do take seriously but feel are not lived up to).

This pride is one of having great wealth and being a country of uninterrupted progress that is measurable by what is in stores and what is in our homes. Or that's my first theory. It must be difficult for people to imagine that things are going to get worse, not better. I know that its a difficult prospect for me as I head out on my own. What the next week will bring is a difficult enough question that looking 6 months into the future seems impossible. And this really adds to the sense of anxiety that is creeping into the minds of many people I talk to every day. Day by day people look to the stock markets as barometers of their own futures and they await whatever reactions come from the brokers and traders.

What a downer of a blog post. And this really doesn't contribute anything of merit. But sometimes I just like to hink out loud.