US – Thursday, September 2

The only thing to fear

The Defense Department bright lights who decided to swoop Air Force One low over Manhattan last week, it’s now clear, did us all a favor: By panicking an entire city about the prospect of another 9/11, they gave us a welcome respite from panicking about swine flu.

Panic, in fact, is the default mode these days, whether what’s setting it off is the threat of global pandemic or merely of our car warranties not being honored. A friend who works in an ER says she’s seeing more twentysomethings showing up complaining of chest pains; a recent conversation in my doctor’s waiting room went like this: “How are you?” “Stressed.” “You, me, everybody’s stressed.”  

There’s a reason, after all, that back in the 19th century they used to call economic depressions “panics.” When FDR, during the Panic of 1933, famously proclaimed that “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” he meant it literally: Like today, people were afraid to spend a dollar because they didn’t know where the next one would come from. 

And what broke that vicious cycle last time? Read books like Studs Terkel’s “Hard Times,” which relates people’s memories of the Depression in their own words, and you hear how government programs like the Works Progress Administration not only helped provide jobs, but hope. When the world you know is crumbling before your eyes, it’s good to know that there’s some institution that will still be around next week to issue you a paycheck. Obama’s “stimulus spending” doesn’t have quite the same ring to it. And there were other sources of strength as well: unions, “unemployed councils,” and other groups that did everything from returning evicted families to their homes — breaking in to do so, if necessary — to agitating for new legislation like Social Security. 

“They sort of threw away the rule book and just organized people to get something to eat,” one Depression victim told Terkel. Maybe our motto for the new hard times should be: Don’t panic, organize.