History adds come clarity to new crises

Yesterday morning after the big stock drop on Bloody Monday, as some experts were calling this week’s Wall Street woes, I listened to a radio commentator report in a gloomy tone that the Tuesday market was opening with the Dow Jones under 11,000 points for the first time in two months.

Yes, two months.

Not 27 months or six years or 34 years or for the first time since 1932. The Dow Jones was opening at its lowest point in TWO MONTHS.

How are we ever going to adjust to that calamity?

Yes, the U.S. economy is in trouble. People are hurting, compared to how they were living a couple of years ago. Jobs are being cut, the dollar isn’t buying as much, the body politic seems frozen by indecision and partisan gridlock. So how bad is it, really?

Unemployment is running at about 6 percent, maybe a tenth of a point or two higher. Not good, but not bad as a “crisis” goes. The housing market is in the tank, but that’s only compared to the boom of recent years when “starter” homes couldn’t be built fast enough to sell at $250,000.

Even with gasoline hovering at $4 a gallon in most markets this summer, the decrease in national mileage traveled was down only about 5 percent - hardly a sign of desperate times. Prices of food and other goods was increasing at about the same rate as the cost of energy, but the grocery shelves were amply stocked with fresh produce and popular restaurants still had waiting lines at their doors.

Now every home has at least one computer, three flat-screen TV sets and an inventory of iPods and other electronic gadgets to equip a squadron.

Our idea of hardship these days is having to cancel the premium service on our satellite TV programming.

As a friend of mine said recently, things are so bad that the nation’s war on poverty has become a war on obesity.

Yeah, things are tough. But compared to most of the world, we’re not even hurting yet. We’re more comfortable than any society in human history, we enjoy more freedom than any nation on the planet, we’re a people still full of innovation, our resources are bountiful and our homes are secure.

The only reason we think we’ve got it so bad is because we’ve had it so good.

Even after the devastating hit to our economy when terrorists struck the World Trade Center towers seven years ago, we fought back to all-time highs as measured by nearly every economic indicator. After what at the time seemed like a crippling blow to the nation’s knees, the nation was back on a roll in five short years.

By any standard, life is good. Our drinking water has never been cleaner, our cities’ skies have never been clearer, our lives have never been longer, our comforts have never been greater and our assets have never been more abundant.

Maybe some hard times would do us good.

I had the humbling experience this week of listening to a man recall the true hardships and human suffering of his parents, refugees in Europe at the end of World War II. They were among the millions of people who had been uprooted from their homelands during the war, wandering in fright as their fate was determined by forces well beyond their control.

Their families had been torn apart, their lives left tattered, their possessions contained in a single bag, their futures bleak, or worse.

Even as peace was declared and celebrated, they were among the millions of desperate people who were seemingly lost souls haunted by overwhelming hopelessness.

They knew true hardship, and their stories dumbfounded everyone in the room who listened.

Yes, today’s global economy is experiencing a few pains, and many of our family budgets are feeling a pinch. But a good dose of history can quickly put things in proper perspective.

Certainly there are causes for worry, and we can find grounds for concern.

After all, this week things are worse than they’ve been in TWO WHOLE MONTHS.