There seem to be a lot of “the sky is falling” retrospectives on the radio this week. In particular, there was the “This American Life” about Circuit City stores closing. Ah, those heady days when the financial collapse was new and we were all a little giddy about the jerks finally getting served. Karma was biting them right in the ass and things were going to be right for the little guy again.
These days it seems like the fun is over. Some of those people who lost their jobs when the Circuit City closed still don’t have work. Same goes for the people who worked for the people who were constructing shady real estate deals. The people who worked for the people were not shady people. But they are still unemployed people. And the economy is, in some ways, still dead dead dead.
I’m not trying to be a nattering nabob of negativism, and in fact my ‘tude is better today than it has been all week. My point is more that, if McDreamy called it on the OR table 18 months ago, we are just now getting through the bargaining stage, having already been through denial and anger. What scares me is that acceptance is next.
Not acceptance so much that the new normal is smaller, simpler, and less aggressive. The acceptance I fear we are headed for is one in which we know the bastards are buying houses again. They’re fixing them up – sort of – and flipping them. They’re packaging up all these bullshit financial derivatives and calling it “innovation.” They’re telling us how much smarter they are and we need to just go along to get along. And, after a couple of years of collectively eating carpet lint for dinner, we’re ready to be shined on for a while. No matter that this is how we came to be eating the lint in the first place.