October 2008 Archives

As one anonymous poster from my High School snidely remarked: I seem to have run screaming from my past. Its a gross oversimplification, but on one point it is accurate: I have no Alma Mater.

BYU keeps trying to get me to call them to "update my information." Since the only thing's I've ever got from them are a magazine full of sappy Mormon stories and mass mailings, I don't have a burning urge to call them back. I can see my phone number being sold to every pyramid scheme in Utah County.

I must admit a bit of envy at people who decorate their cubicles with school colors and get all excited about the "big game." Besides not being a big cheerleader type (too much like being in a cult), I don't have an Alma Mater I respect in any way (BYU was and is all about censorship, I just can't support that).

So when the trainer said "now that triathlon season is over, you need to do the Dawg Dash!" I was a bit thrown. The event is in support of the University of Washington (the Huskies or "Dawgs") and involves either a 5 or 10k run and you are encouraged to bring your dog to run with you! I wondered if they would take a BYU alum. I wondered if I could handle being around a bunch of people in school colors.

The event was a lot of fun. I made good time (33 min) on the 5k, considering how many hills they have. I was more than a minute faster than the average time and have been sore for three days (always a good sign). The next day I wore the (very nice) event shirt to work to show my support for my co-worker's Alma Mater.

I don't think I'm ready to adopt a new Alma Mater and I'm still not a cheerleader type (competitive though? yes!) but I am kinda wistful for an institution that I could respect and like enough to call my own.

As I try to calm down in the face of overwhelming anxiety, caused by the painful similarities between our current economic problems and the ones that left me temporarily homeless and unemployed for two years back in 2001, I am trying to understand two things:

1-To what extent my past is influencing my view of the current situation? (a lot)
2-Why people like my right-leaning co-worker think that banks can go under, stocks crash, and unemployment go up, and it will be good for us?

The first answer is pretty obvious: starting with the fire in 2000 my life became so stressful and uncertain that I've had symptoms of PTSD ever since. To this day whenever I hear people talk about how "close knit" small communities are and how Mormons are to be envied for being so tight with each other I find myself exploding in an emotional tirade. Those communities aren't as supportive as they seem and if you offend them they will kick you out and do everything in their power to destroy you.

People who have known me since I moved to Seattle agree: I talk about it much less than I used to...

So I'm letting my bad experience trigger panic and forgetting that I'm in a much better place now than I was in 2001 and odds are I'll come through this just fine.

But the second question is more puzzling.

I tried to understand my coworker's view, that the people who created this mess aren't the political and financial institutions, but rather the people who borrowed more than they could afford to get things they didn't need. And where the institutions failed, it was because they had hired these "hot shot" kids as money managers. But the old guard, they were stable and their only mistake was to give in to customer demands for higher returns.

I'm oversimplifying his argument, but his basic point was that the only people who would be hurt by a collapse are people who, through their selfish, consumerist, actions, deserve to suffer. He honestly believes that his suffering will be minor and a fair price to pay for a return to some pure-free-market nirvana (that has never existed...).

As I came to see his view, I saw why I can't argue with him: he has a vision of the future, based on his own fantasies and experiences. No amount of data will change it. I feel for politicians who try to effect that change in voters. If people see reality, they see that the future is probabilities, not certainty. But certainty is so much more comforting (its why religion is so popular: it gives a sense of certainty that is false, but feels good).

Based on my anxiety-inducing experiences, I see a future of soup-kitchens and double-digit unemployment. I have the presence of mind, however, to know that I'm clouded. Reality is different: we may end up in my worst-case scenario, we may not. The difficult thing is to decide which probability is most likely and prepare for it while not ignoring the other probabilities.

But since we are animals, we hoard. There's nowhere to flee, we're too low on the power pyramid to fight, so we freeze. And that makes one probability become a certainty.