The financial sky is falling. Hey, that’s not my opinion; it’s news straight from the front pages of the Wall Street Journal and New York Times. America’s top mortgage companies and investment banks, and the world’s biggest insurer have either already gone bankrupt or are in the process of doing so.

For someone who wrote a book titled The Party’s Over, this might seem like a propitious moment to shock readers into greater depths of fear and apprehension. After all, we’re only witnessing the doom of the financial world now; we have yet to see the collapse of the transport and food infrastructures, which are merely fluttering at the moment as the result of high oil prices. When the inevitable and imminent decline in world oil production really starts to bite, the support struts of normalcy will truly come unglued.

Okay, so let’s all have a good scream now: AAAAAIIIEEEEEEGGGGGHHHHHHH!!!!!!!

Good. Now that that’s out of our systems, let’s reflect. Panic helps no one. We have a diminishing amount of time in which to work within a structure that still has some semblance of stability. We should take advantage of every remaining moment. Now is the time for careful, methodical action. Chances are, the scaffolding will not come crashing down at once; this will be an extended process lasting many years, perhaps even decades (if John Michael Greer is right in his new book, The Long Descent).

Nevertheless, certain things will almost certainly become more difficult as “normal life” becomes a fading memory. Calmly explain to family and friends what’s happening (too many people using too much too fast, inevitable depletion of resources, and economic consequences of same) and urge them to take the situation seriously and start reducing their exposure (Garden! Home energy audit! Bicycle! Smaller car!).

Get your money out of risky banks and investments and put it to work in your local community (go to www.solari.com for advice in this regard). If you haven’t done so already, get to know your neighbors and make connections with others in your community who have similar concerns.

When we’re panicked, we tend to think only of our own immediate safety. But we sometimes do things that in retrospect appear foolish or short-sighted. Now is the time to be thinking of community resilience—because that’s what our long-term prospects really depend on.

Food for thought:

Of the well-to-do, in particular, few were gravely disturbed in 1930. Many of them had been grievously hurt in the Panic, but they had tried to laugh off their losses, to grin at the jokes about brokers and speculators which were going the rounds. As 1930 wore on, they were aware of the depression chiefly as something that made business slow and uncertain and did terrible things to the prices of securities. To business men in "Middletown," a representative small mid-Western city, until 1932 "the Depression was mainly something they read about in the newspapers"--despite the fact that by 1930 every fourth factory worker in the city had lost his job...

When the substantial and well-informed citizens who belonged to the National Economic League were polled in January, 1930, as to what they considered the "paramount problems of the United States of 1930," their vote put the following problems at the head of the list: 1. Administration of Justice; 2. Prohibition; 3. Lawlessness, Disrespect for Law; 4. Crime; 5. Law Enforcement; 6. World Peace--and they put Unemployment, down in eighteenth place.

--Frederick Lewis Allen, Since Yesterday

image credit: JL2003 (creative commons)