Brother, can you spare a dime?

What a fascinating modern age we live in.  It seems as though everything we as Americans once knew is coming to an end.  With the economy in complete turmoil everything seems to be topsy turvy.  We all have questions on our mind.  What will happen?  Will I still have a job in three months?  Will I still have a home in four?  Will the stimulus package work?  What will happen if it doesn’t?  We see our hopes and dreams dangling delicately in the balance.  As painful as that is, I cannot help but hear my grandmother’s voice in my head saying, “I told you so.”  

The worst part is, she is right.  For generations now, since the end of the Great Depression, credit has been a way of life.  Credit card, loan, and interest are household words.  My grandmother always said, “You can’t spend money you don’t have.”  Well, as it turns out, she seems to be right.  As I watch the Dow Jones slide further and further down, though perhaps not as fast as in October, my financial mistakes, and the mistakes of society in general come into prime focus.  

I owe a lot of money.  I owe on a credit card for this laptop, but mostly I owe for student loans.  Without these loans I never would have been able to go to college.  This is how I justified them.  I would go to college, get an education and then make enough money to pay them back in a timely manner.  Now I see this may have been erroneous, and as the economic climate grows darker (though not nearly as bad as we’d like to think) I’m having to face a painful reality that maybe I will not be making the big bucks as I had hoped ... as I had counted on.  So what do I do?  I keep doing what I do.  I love to teach, and one way or the other that is what I will do.

The main question that resounds in everybody’s head is, “Could we have prevented this, can we stop it?”  The answers, respectively, are no and no.  We could not have prevented this, though we could have made it less painful, and we cannot stop it, though we can help each other and make it less disastrous.  Due to the fact we all have, or rather many of us have, debt, our economy is in crisis.  President Obama says, to fix this we must be able to borrow more money on credit from the banks.  I firmly assert that this is an awful mistake.  Borrowing will help us now perhaps, but what happens in ten years, when we are even more in debt, and the economy takes another down turn?  Are we going to look to the federal government to make it possible for us to borrow more money?

We should have listened to my grandma.  Right from the start.  With credit and loans we get things we want, things the neighbors have, things our parents never dreamt of having.  However, when a recession hits, it hits us hard because we have nothing to fall back on.  No savings, at least none after creditors have their way with you, no bonds, no stocks worth mentioning, nothing but the hands of those who want to be paid.  When I asked my grandma if she remembered the stock market crash of 1929 she said, “Yes.  I remember it in the newspaper.”  I was so excited to hear about people jumping off of buildings and the like, however she went on to say, “But we didn’t notice.  We were poor before, and we were poor after.”

Perhaps she was onto something there.  It is true, our economy has never been higher than it was in the last few years, but maybe that just sets us up for failure.  Maybe we need to live with less, deal with not as much, learn to live without those products we get from China.  Maybe if we just lived with what we need instead of what we want, when the next recession comes, we won’t feel it as much.  Maybe it will be like my grandma says.  Maybe we won’t be poor before, we’ll just be living like it, but the point is we won’t be poor after either.  At least not destitute.  If something must have money we could pay in cash, instead of relying on credit.  

This idea definitely would change how we run our lives.  First off, I would not be in college.  I would be somewhere else, doing something else.  Who knows what.  I would not be writing this on my lap top, but rather on a piece of paper, or on the computer at the public library.  Are these sacrifices I would be willing to give up?  Apparently not, cause I am still in school, I still have this lap top, and I have no plans to pawn it.  But maybe we should teach our children to live without credit.  Get out of debt now, and live a life free of loans.

It is true that this would change everything we know.  Perhaps we cannot do it.  I don’t know if I can, but it is just a thought.  Something worth considering, and something certainly worth trying.  Who knows how things will turn out.