Is it just me, or have we gone overboard on this end-of-life-as-we-know-it recession stuff?
I am not making light of people in genuine economic peril, and God knows there are plenty of them. I'm not discounting some things that could well mean the end of life as we know it (global warming comes to mind). I think what I am making light of are stories written by journalists who have perhaps a skewed (ahem!) idea of what "deprivation" means, due--I can only surmise--to their own sheltered upbringing, or perhaps their editors' too-focused attention on appealing to an upscale readership demographic. I am not Ma Joad by any means, and my chronological age is well under the century mark, but I can remember when moms did their own canning, lots and lots of people had vegetable gardens and thought nothing of it, and sewing one's own clothes was considered a perfectly unremarkable fashion choice. (My sister sewed my prom dress, which I still remember with affection.) When birthdays came, someone (usually mom) whipped up a chocolate cake and the family sang "Happy Birthday" at dessert time. Life went on.
These days, however, it seems to be a great big friggin' deal when parents have to forego the $500 birthday bash for their kid at the local dinner theater/theme part, and opt instead for the birthday cake from the bakery at Giant and family dinner, with a few presents. Or take this piece, in today's metro section of my own newspaper, the Washington Post, about an Ashburn, Va. family who have had to give up shopping at Juicy Couture, start clipping coupons and buy frozen shrimp instead of fresh. Lord Almighty, the End Times are here.
Maybe, in a perverse way, these news items are meant to cheer us up: a nation that can steel itself to eat frozen shrimp instead of fresh can weather almost any crisis, right? But I suspect, sadly, that the real explanation has more to do with the growing income inequality in this country, the alternate realities inhabited by the poor and everybody else, and the fact that it's pretty hard to get a job at the New York Times or any other big-name media organization if you began your life in a trailer park, and thus have some real-life experience of what "doing without" actually looks like. Mind you, I don't have any first-hand experience of living in a trailer park, either, but nobody ever said journalists have to know everything from first-hand experience. The only true bona fide job requirement of being a journalist is to know what it is you don't know. These days, a lot of economic stories seem to be written a journalists who don't know what they don't know. Or maybe it's their editors. I don't know.
Meanwhile, all these stories of hard-hit suburbanites just barely scraping by in their clothes from Target provide a rich source of unintentional hilarity. Someday, the kids of today will tell their grandchildren about the bad old days, when mom and dad couldn't afford their Tae Kwon Do lessons and the family had to sell the SUV. Let's hope the grandchillun don't rise up and strangle them.
