My parents were born in the 1920s. They were children during the Great Depression* of the 1930s. Hence, I have lived my life in the shadow of those dark times. So the present crisis feels strangely comfortable. Not in the sense of It Feels Good, but in the sense of I Recognise This.
It was interesting to overhear a couple of youngsters in the National Library's cafe a few mornings ago, talking about how people of their generation have never seen anything like a depression, and that they didn't know how they were all going to cope. It's a good question. Looking back at the degree of self-sufficiency that my dad and his brothers were capable of, it is quite amazing what skills have been lost in the space of a couple of generations. Heck, I have it on good authority that there are people out there who don't even know how to cook, let alone how to grow some basic produce, darn socks, patch trousers, and all the many other things that come with not having any money.
But might there be a silver lining to an absolute economic meltdown? You would almost have to be the kind of person who believes things happen for a reason (unlike, say, me, who believes only in the utterly meaningless randomness of existence) to think along these lines, but this is how it would go:
1. All the money evaporates (if it hasn't already). Bosses can't pay their bills or their workers. Everybody gets laid off. Machinery shuts down. People have no money for petrol. Planes stop flying. Nobody buys anything. Result: nobody makes anything.
2. The positive spin-off of this is that consumption of fossil fuels dramatically falls, more so than it would have under any scheme (national or international) that would have had any scope of succeeding.
3. Climate scientists pinch themselves, then realise that global warming projections can be revised, for once, in a favourable direction.
4. In a bid to get the wheels of industry turning once more, governments the world over engage in a co-ordinated New Deal type of arrangement, whereby huge sums of government money are ploughed into alternative energy schemes and energy-efficient infrastructure developments. So that when those wheels start whizzing around again at full speed (as they inevitably will), they will be spinning on green technology.
Like I said, you would have to be crazy to believe in something like that. But sometimes, as they say, being crazy helps.
*And just because it was called the "Great Depression" doesn't mean that it was a one-of-a-kind event, never to be repeated. What we know as the First World War was known, until the next one broke out, as the "Great War", or the "World War". It wasn't, as far as I can see, until a couple of years into World War II that the New Yorker, which we trust in most things, started calling the earlier one the "first World War", and then with the word "first" in a somewhat hesitant or provisional lower case. So, by the time we work through the present crisis, who knows, the Great Depression might have been renamed the Little Dip.
