Slow Motion Train Wreck

Because of their size, big disasters can take some time developing. It’s all a matter of perspective: the sheer size and mass of a train going off the tracks at high speed can look, from a distance, like it’s happening in slow motion. Yet if you’re in the middle of it there is no time to react, all you can hope is that it is over mercifully quick. Hurricane Katrina took a couple of days crossing the Gulf of Mexico before it hit New Orleans with winds in excess of 175 MPH. People had a couple of days to contemplate that disaster before it arrived, and then more time, weeks even, for the post-disaster disaster. Train wrecks, plane crashes, earthquakes, and tsunamis hit faster than hurricanes, with more of a surprise factor. The effects of those disasters then get slowly realized as body counts mount. The aftermath of Katrina, too, turned worse because of the unpreparedness and because of the inept response of the nation.

We are going through an economic disaster that is very much like Katrina now, here in the United States as well as around the world. Most of us don’t see it coming — it’s just another tropical storm without a name yet — and are blissfully unaware of the totally inadequate financial levees that are about to burst. As far as any kind of emergency response, we’re about out of options. Self-sufficiency and discipline are no longer American strengths.

What should we call this storm that doesn’t have a name yet? I’d like to call it the Great Depression. It’s going to be bigger and worse than that other one, which we may as well rename something else. Maybe we can call it the Thirties Depression, or The First Depression (making this the Second, in the same way The Great War turned into World War One to make way for World War Two).

The First Depression didn’t happen overnight, although that is the impression I’ve always had about it. There was the stock market crash of 1929, and we were in the First Depression. That’s not really what happened. First there was Black Thursday (October 24) but even before that, the market had declined by around 17% and then recovered about half that in the weeks before Black Thursday. Measures were taken on Friday October 25 to stop the slide, but October 28 turned into Black Monday (13% loss) and that was followed by Black Tuesday (12% loss). The market recovered a bit through April 1930, but then began another slide that, by July 1932, had resulted in a loss of 89% for the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

I’ve been reading about the First Depression, trying to understand when people realized what was going on, how bad it would be, how long it might last. It’s hard to get a sense of that from the articles I’ve read so far on the Internet. I hope that some day, my grandchildren will be able to ask me what it was like living through this disaster. That hope, and all it implies, is what motivates me these days.