Fashionable Depression

As the country spirals into another depression (perhaps not a Great Depression requiring capital letters...yet), I am struck by how often, what we imagine to be the worst does not fit reality. The images in my head of a depression are long lines of drably dressed men and women with solemn faces and dirty cheeks. There are streets of dingy gray and black where the unemployed huddle around small fires built in overturned apple boxes. Joad families sleep on the side of the road and storefronts sit abandoned and boarded up. There are hands, endless hands, reaching out for some kind of help and skinny, sad children with hollow eyes and hungry bellies. Farmlands are dust and small towns abandoned.

When I hear the reports of our current gloom and doom, I have a hard time believing it. Take for instance the images on our TVs. Businesses are still advertising, which, depending on the elaborateness of the production, can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. There are still an abundance of car commercials with sleek, fast cars racing across deserts or bouncing over unprotected wilderness into places many of us have not seen or will not see in our lifetimes. Walmart commercials make appeals to Jewish customers encouraging them to buy expensive gadgets and hand them out for each day of Hanukkah. My favorite commercial is of a family preparing for a holiday dinner and the food is plentiful -- too many dinner rolls, an enormous turkey, a multitude of pies and cookies, and piles of steaming vegetables.

Just yesterday I went shopping at Costco. In the middle of a weekday, mid-morning, I thought the store would be relatively calm. I was wrong. I had to park the car in the farthest lot and elbow short women for the pick of organic chicken. Large men pushed huge flatbed carts laden with beverages and chips and boxed cereals and winter coats. At one point, the carts were so thick in the expansive aisle we couldn't move. One woman turned to another, their carts piled high with books, kid clothes, coffee, and toys and asked, "Looks like you've finished your shopping for the holidays."

"Oh no," replied the other woman, "I haven't even begun. These are just things we need."

Things we need? When I think of the Great Depression, I think of the Waltons scrapping together 5 cents to purchase a bag of flour so Ma Walton could feed her family on biscuits and squirrel stew for the next month. They shared small helpings at their dinner table, not mountains of mashed potatoes or expensive coffee in quart-sized bags. If people didn't go without, they certainly went with less and I have yet to see such diminished abundance in this day and age.

I know things are slowing down at work. I haven't worked many hours of late and when I have, there are not the usual number of customers filling their bags with pricey long underwear or carrying three pairs of skis to the register. Still, I've sold numerous pieces of luggage to people traveling to Europe or Vietnam, any number of sleeping bags for holiday family sleepovers, and expensive heart rate monitors for stocking stuffers.

In our neighborhood, the local Starbucks parking lot is always full and when I go to the store, I still see people ringing up their credit cards with as much ferocity as they did in the past. Last night, as we watched television, a commercial came on explaining that the average American has 8 credit cards and a minimum of $8000 in credit card debt. I turned to Ann and said, "How many credit cards do we have?"

"We have one we share and I have one other and so do you. So that makes three, right?"

"But technically, if we were like average Americans, we'd each be 6 short. How much credit card debt do we have?" I knew the answer to this, but I wanted her to express it out loud.

"None. You know we pay it off every month. You pay the bills!" She was a bit annoyed. "We aren't average, honey. We'll be okay."

Is that what every American is saying to themselves across the nation...we'll be okay?"

I knew we were better than average, so to speak. I knew we don't overindulge, but we certainly don't live a Spartan life and that is what I think it should be like in this new depression. I expect everything to be in sepia tones and dismal. I expect to see fewer cars in driveways and fewer electronic devices in shopping carts, but I have yet to see it. Why? Do we think we can just keep buying on credit and not suffer any consequences? Do we think the economic woes of our times will only impact others and not us? Do we think Obama is going to pull us out of this on January 21?

These are the things that keep me up at night. Odd, I know, but I keep waiting for the "crisis" to fit the images in my head and so far I've been sorely disappointed. Not that I want long lines at soup kitchens or starving children with their hands outstretched. I just think we might change our ways if we really had to suffer. We might actually realize that things do not a life make or that an economy dependent on consumption eventually eats itself. But no, it appears that this depression will be much more fashionable than the last, that our "suffering" will be dressed in Gore-tex and cashmere bought at bargain prices in the abundant aisles of warehouse stores.