The Only Thing We Have to Fear...

"The only thing we have to fear, is fear itself" - Franklin Delano Roosevelt

My wife's cousin Brian Kaller, in his cover story for American Conservative magazine, Wreck of the Irish, presents a grim picture of Ireland following the financial crisis of 2008.  He laments the wasted opportunities where their government failed to capitalize on economy, booming thanks to the tech and housing industries.  The chance to spend those tax dollars on roads and libraries is now gone, along with the good times.  But Kaller, who moved to Ireland a few years ago, relates how the Irish are coping with their crash.

...our Irish neighbors have an advantage, even if they don’t realize it. People here grew their own food, made and fixed their own belongings, and scraped by recently enough that older people remember how to do such things. Families are closer, literally and figuratively, and many of them include farmers. Some people here still know how to garden, forage, dig peat out of the bog for fuel, and handle animals—enough of a critical mass to teach others quickly. The lives of people here might stand up to more punishment than Americans can handle, in the same way that the stone bridges near our house still take daily traffic after 250 years and will continue to do so long after today’s shopping-mall infrastructure has crumbled. Transition to a post-crash life will not be pleasant, but here, more so than in America, it will be possible.

As Kaller recounts the resilience of his neighbors, who like a mourner leaving the gravesite vows to push on, an American fatalism surfaces.  He senses that the same fate of the Irish awaits us.

Serious crashes can happen, of course, and our technology does not make us immune to them. There is a reason Ireland has so much open country and so many ruins; in an earlier age of railroads and mass communications, one crop failed, and a third of the island’s eight million people died or fled. We Americans have lived for decades at the other extreme of prosperity. Most nations live somewhere in-between—which is where the U.S. is likely to find itself sooner rather than later.

While we can learn from the Irish experience, attempting to draw definitive answers for us will be difficult, just as the captain of a large Ocean vessel can only use so much information derived from the sinking of a sailboat.  This isn't to belittle Ireland, but the analogy adds perspective.  Americans do view this nation much like the Titanic - as an unsinkable ship; a very apt view.  Unlike Ireland and every other nation, America is uniquely positioned to handle whatever may come.