Normal Isn't Coming Back. Now What?

Or so James K. Galbraith said in the Mar/Apr edition of the Washington Monthly, in his article, No Return to Normal. In it, he describes the attitudes that are preventing Obama's financial team from getting a clue about the depths of the financial crisis and why we're set up for a longer, more difficult downturn than political leaders want to believe:

... The deepest belief of the modern economist is that the economy is a self-stabilizing system. This means that, even if nothing is done, normal rates of employment and production will someday return. Practically all modern economists believe this, often without thinking much about it. (Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said it reflexively in a major speech in London in January: "The global economy will recover." He did not say how he knew.)

... The Bush-era disasters guarantee that these happy patterns will not be repeated. For the first time since the 1930s, millions of American households are financially ruined. Families that two years ago enjoyed wealth in stocks and in their homes now have neither. Their 401(k)s have fallen by half, their mortgages are a burden, and their homes are an albatross. For many the best strategy is to mail the keys to the bank. This practically assures that excess supply and collapsed prices in housing will continue for years. ...

... In addition, some of the biggest banks are bust, almost for certain. Having abandoned prudent risk management in a climate of regulatory negligence and complicity under Bush, these banks participated gleefully in a poisonous game of abusive mortgage originations followed by rounds of pass-the-bad-penny-to-the-greater-fool. But they could not pass them all. ...

And today we read that 742,000 jobs were lost in March. Holy. Frakking. Hell. Three quarters of a million people just got ruined financially.

My fellow Gen Xers, Millennial successors and Boomer parents are all entering into very weird territory. Worries for more and more families are shifting towards a fear for the lack of basic necessities, such as food. It's time to call Grandma and ask her about the Victory Garden, for sure. Plant early to avoid the rush.

And if your grandmother didn't have a Victory Garden (my surviving grandmother wired jets at Lockheed, instead,) or you can't ask her about them, German feminist Maria Mies opened the book she co-authored with Veronika Bennholdt-Thomas, The Subsistence Perspective, with a post-WWII story from her own family.

From My mother and the sow. Life has to go on., as published in The Subsistence Perspective:

... It was in February or March of the year 1945. The end of the war was approaching. My parents were peasants. Our village was close to the Western front in the Eifel. Five of my brothers were soldiers, somewhere in the East. around this time the ragged and lice-ridden soldiers of the beaten German army returned from the West and were searching for a bit of warmth and something to eat from the peasants. every evening, mother cooked a pot of milk soup and boiled a pot of potatoes in their jackets. Ever night, soldiers sat around the table with us.

Peaple had given up hope. Most of the peasants butchered their cows and pigs; they did not bother to plough or to sow. Everbody was waiting for the end of the war without a thought beyond that end. At that time, my mother took the sow to the boar in the neighbouring village - pigs and the raising of piglets was women's work. It also was a source of revenue for them. The neighbours laughed at her and said she should slaughter the pig instead; did she not see that everything was coming to an end.

My mother replied, 'Life goes on.' Perhaps she even said, 'Life has to go on!'

She took the sow to the boar. And at the end of May, after the war had ended, the sow had twelve piglets. Nobody had young pigs, calves, or foals. Since money had lost its value, mother traded her piglets for shoes, trousers, shirts and jackets for her five sons, who one after the other returned from the war. Life went on. But did it go on by itself?

My mother didn't just sit down and say, 'Life will go on,' or, as a Christian peasant woman, 'The Lord will provide.' She knew that she had to act, that she had to cooperate with nature - so that life could continue. That is what she always said: life has to go on. That was her wish, her passion, which constituted her joy and her will for life.

My mother was not a feminist and she didn't know the word ecology, but she had recognised something which is today as urgently needed as daily bread, namely that we have to assume responsibility for life if we want it to continue.

The increasing ecological catastrophies teach us that modern industrial society dostroyes, with its relentless pursuit of continuous growth of goods and money, the ability of nature to regenerate herself, until she is totally exhausted. This applies to human life, particularly that of women and children, as well as to non-human nature. ...

It's a hard time for a lot of people right now, but life has to go on. We have to preserve each other. We have to preserve our ability to feed ourselves and maintain the stuff of life, the flow of necessary sustenance, whether the wage economy recovers in the near term or not - especially since it looks increasingly like it won't.

Life, and other people, are what gives value to the world and the things traded in the economy that's crashing down around our ears. Our fellow humans and the diversity of life on this shining bubble in the vacuum of space are the priceless, the only irreplaceable, valuables.

If we feed each other, and continue together, and insist that life will go on, maybe it will even turn out all right.

To which end, a yard full of chickens might be enormously helpful ;)

(Photo credit: by Stephen Fulljames on Flickr.)