debt

The national debt crisis has been on my mind something fierce lately. In fact, it has snuck under my skin much more than most governmental issues usually are able to. It's led to a couple of little anxious bouts of considering how I can start guerrilla gardening around town, conserving water, and preparing for the next Depression...a bit extreme, I know...but not entirely impossible. And, mainly, it's led to a lot of long talks with friends about this financial pickle we're in. The history and political science classes I'm in right now are also keeping it on the forefront.

My history professor, specifically, is very inspiring and brings every issue we study into a very realistic and modern context. It can be easy to abstract wars and genocides and revolutions as these far off, fairytale (probably more like ghost story) issues. It's also easy to pack events of the past into convenient, isolated boxes rather than look at the global story. As I've been expanding my knowledge of and perspective on some of the largest events of the last few centuries and drawing parallels, I can't help but see that ol' "history repeating itself" time and again. Thinking about empires and governments scrambling to stay on top, whether in colonization, industrialization, or what have you just reminds me of how fragile we are and always have been.

I think that "Government" becomes this larger than life figure to us sometimes, whether we're fearing it, assuming its corruption and failure, or praising it and assuming its total power and our security in it. Government is just a bunch of little people, mostly men and a few women who have worked twice as hard to prove the worth of their gender, running around and either trying to make positive change or trying to scoop up more power. They are, in more ways than not, like us and when it comes to issues such as this debt crisis at hand, there's no "right answer".

The Great Depression spanned more than a decade and, naturally, because the U.S. is and has been one of the biggest kids on the playground, affected the economies and individual lives of people in almost every country in the world. I recently learned that, once the U.S. stock market crashed, we were forced to pull our financial aid back that we were pumping into other, hurting countries. One of the main beneficiaries of U.S. loans at the time was Germany. We can look back now and see the horrible, indirect part our Depression played in giving Hitler an opportunity. I'm not trying to get all Doomsday here, but it's crazy to realize and important to recognize the ripple effects that come from events like these. My great-grandparents and a couple of my grandparents lived during the Great Depression...it's not so far-removed as we might prefer to think.

Even more recent history was the 2008 Great Recession that spun out of the Global Financial Crisis, the worst since the 1930s. I remember the panic at the time, but I was fairly ignorant about the depth of what was occurring back then. We narrowly avoided another Depression and global economic collapse. So, everything happening today is not out of the blue. There are many, intelligent people thinking and writing about the crisis. I just don't think there are any easy answers. There are many factors involved in the economy and it's difficult to understand them all. This is a very pared down and easy to understand primer. Everything's better with animation! The next few days will be very interesting as we watch Obama and the House continue to battle it out. In the meantime, I'm going to take a deep breath, de-stress with my hula hoop, and start helping folks get the community garden off the ground in Huntsville that has slowly been in the works for a long time. :)