While time and again the media is making comparisons between America's current economic crisis and the Great Depression of the 1930's, there is one central element that they seem to miss. Today's financial chaos was born out of my generation's love of debt.
Whether it was the CEO's and stockholders of multi-billion dollar corporations, or average homeowners, everyone wanted to leverage their existing assets in order to create greater wealth. And debt was the way to do it.
This would have struck my parents, children of The Depression, as sheer folly. Their generation knew nothing is ever certain in life, that cherished assumptions could disappear virtually overnight. Sudden bank failures. Valuable stock certificates reduced to scrap paper. They'd seen it all.
My generation, raised during the prosperous decades following World War II, only knew optimism. Our parents sacrificed so we could enjoy. And enjoy we did! Yet, in the great scheme of things, a few decades isn't a particularly long period of time. (Even if the big hair and padded shoulders of the 1980's now seem like another century...)
We had no idea things could ever go so wrong. Or that we didn't understand the implications of the complex financial strategies we so eagerly embraced. My generation is largely a stranger to sacrifice, adherents to a philosophy that assumed life inevitably progresses, and with it comes personal fulfillment and inevitable wealth.
The fact that the news media is missing this story shouldn't be surprising either. The reporters and editors charged with unraveling this puzzle -- Gen X, Gen Y and Millennials -- are even further removed from the events, the psychology and the tragedies that took place nearly 80 years. Having failed to learn those lessons ourselves, it's not surprising we didn't pass them along.
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