Living the Nightmare

Has anyone thought about the fact that we are going to become the generation who will continually ask each other if they lived through...the great economic slowdown or the big, ugly recession or the pseudo-depression of the 21st century?  We already have a bunch of events like that in my generation, events that trigger memories and nostalgia.  There's the Apollo moon landing, there's the Kennedy, the King and the Kennedy again assasinations, there's the Vietnam War peace marches, there's the Beatles' first appearance on Ed Sullivan, there's Mt. St. Helen's erupting, there's the Columbus Day Storm (hurricane), there's probably other stuff too but this was the big stuff.

Now we have this economic meltdown when all of the money we've been saving for so many years is turning into dust before our very eyes.  As an HR Director, what a great year to have a 401(k) participation target!  NOT!  

Anyway, if you think about the photographs from the first "Great Depression", I'm starting to watch for the families living in cars, hobos hopping the freight trains, more hitchhikers, empty, boarded-up houses, abandoned beat up and stripped down cars; you have to wonder if it's going to go that far.  I don't see anything or anyone stopping it.  We have become our own worst enemies and that fear feeding upon itself is exactly what is taking us down.  If we were in one big petrie dish, we would create a truly fearsome/fearful organism.