The Fiscal Cliff - Shut Up or Jump Off

I'm getting very tired of the hopelessness people are displaying regarding the 'fiscal cliff'.  It's ridiculous when you look at it from a broader scope.  Historical comparison shows us that this is really nothing, and I think people need to stop complaining about it and make the best of things.  This is coming from someone who is living on the low end of the financial spectrum, here, so if I can say that anyone can.

Fear, depression and hopelessness are self-fulfilling prophecies, making it much more difficult to recover from the current situation.  I'm not just talking about an economic downturn here, either.  Everything we do in life is affected by our attitudes.  These destructive emotions feed on themselves, eventually growing so big that there's no longer any way to stave off the hungry monsters.

While there's life there's hope - Cicero, Ad Atticum

 Truer words were never spoken.  The thing is, if people feel hopeless they won't even bother trying to change their personal situation, and it will take the efforts of a lot of individuals to improve this situation throughout the world.

I was recently reading an article by another author, upon which a comment was made.  The article was about depression possibly being at a higher level in this generation, and the person who commented said something along the lines of depression being due to the current financial crisis, and that the world was full of people feeling hopeless about their situation.  I have to disagree.

For one thing, true depression is considered to be chemical, having little to do with external stimuli.  For another, there's the historical context.  The Great Depression was a time when people were starving to death in North America, despite growing and raising their own food.  They stood in line for hours for a small loaf of bread, assuming they had the goods to trade for it, or the cash on hand to pay.  Lines of credit were overextended, and they no longer had a tab they could add the bill to, as they weren't able to pay off what they already owed.

The American civil resulted in a similar situation, except that the plantations that had provided the food sources would lie fallow due to the men going off to war.  It takes a full season of growing to get your food source back, and pretty much all livestock in the south had been seized by the Yankees, carpetbaggers, you name it.  I don't know that the south ever fully recovered economically.  They certainly didn't have the slaves to help them anymore.  Don't get me wrong.  I'm very glad slaves were freed, and I consider Lincoln to be somewhat of a hero - he is, in fact, one of the people I admire most in history.  I think the plantation owners had it coming, quite frankly.

With the break-down of the Soviet Union, and shortages in heating oil and supplies, Russia was in a miserable state.  I haven't kept up with how things are there now, so I have no idea if they ever recovered from that, or if they're still living in abject poverty, burning their furniture so as not to freeze to death.

Nothing we're going through now can compare to what people have gone through in the past, or are going through right now in less-developed areas of the world.  Those less-developed areas are going through those things regardless of what the world economy is doing.  They couldn't care less about the US budget.  The G8 has to do with the eight most financially powerful nations in the world, or at least the ones who can agree to sit down and talk about things, and very little to do with the nations that have no clean water.

Sure, Canadians lost jobs.  Sure, things have gotten tight and maybe we can't stuff our bellies with Brie and caviar every night of the week, washing it down with Cristal.  Maybe we can't all drive BMWs or Jaguars, but we can bloody well survive.  If we have a brain in our heads we're not going to die of starvation.  There are ways of getting food in developed countries.  There are shelters available for the homeless should they actually wish to seek them out.  As much as nobody wants to be homeless or hungry, we will survive, particularly as a species.  It isn't the end of the world, for crying out loud.  We're not facing a pandemic that will wipe out most of the population of the planet.  Now that would be a good reason for the depression of a generation.  Or, maybe a cause for celebration, depending on your view of humanity.