The Third Depression

by Jen Jackson

Blog Last Updated; 7/19/2010

My father just lost his job ? yet another casualty of what some are calling The Third Depression (see http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/28/opinion/28krugman.html?_r=1&ref=paulkrugman). This makes the whole damned economic mess hit very close to home.

Of course, intellectually, I've gotten the fact that the economy fell off the tracks a while back. And I've seen evidence of it. But I live a lifestyle - amongst others in a similar socioeconomic class - that has always demanded a certain amount of fiscal conservatism, belt-tightening and a lack of extravagance. I live in a trailer, for chrissakes. Vacation for my friends and me is a river trip (sometimes on a mattress, no less) or a week on foot in the canyons. We drink PBR. We eat grilled cheese sandwiches. Often. None of which is to say it's a bad life. We've all chosen it.

Somewhere along the line, many of us in Moab chose place and the freedom to commune with it over large bank accounts and the 9-to-5 grind. We've chosen to pursue a different kind of success based on a different measure of happiness. With the onset of The Third Depression, it's just made it a little bit harder to pull the various income puzzle pieces together - there are fewer to go around - and we notice more people in the same plight. I worked for a year at the local thrift store, and let me tell you, business there is booming.

But all of this is a much different ball of wax for my parents - with the toll it takes on both their future financial security and their sense of hope and well-being in this world. While some of my friends work seasonally and look forward to the winter months of "fun-employment," drawing checks from the state is anything but fun for my dad. He's a hard worker. The most dedicated I know. This drive is in his genes, coming from an entrepreneurial man - my grandfather - who always found a way to comfortably support a family of ten. My dad sold heavy machinery, equipment that was directly tied to housing starts. With the housing market in the tank in recent years, my dad still found a way to remain amongst the top three salespeople in the company - a company that has locations all up and down the West Coast.

He's a damned hard worker.

Sometimes I have to wonder where the fairness is in all of this?even though I'm old enough to know that the field of economics doesn't operate on principles of fairness. If it did, we wouldn't be in this mess in the first place. And more than sometimes I find myself wondering where my parents go from here. And how might I help them? What can I offer? Could I support them if I had taken that lucrative PR gig straight out of college? Or would I simply be in the same boat right now, peddling my own resume?

I'm hopeful that my dad will find work soon, though it likely won't be in Oregon, a state with one of the highest unemployment rates in the country. In this way, being out of work doesn't simply throw my parent's financial future in limbo. It tosses everything into the air - like someone clumsily pulling the tablecloth out from under all the place-settings, with my parents left to watch the slow-motion gravitational pull on all the breakables. Will they land back in place? Will they land safely in a new configuration? Or will everything simply shatter?

My mom is a lifelong Medford, Oregon, resident. Same with her mother. And her mother. Though she's dreamed, in recent years, of a new beginning elsewhere, I've always wanted the wrenching transition to be on my parents' terms, not foisted upon them by the vicissitudes of an uncaring financial market.

For my friends and me, eating grilled cheese in our unconventional, on-the-cheap homes is life as we know it. We smile and laugh at it often. We have to. It's an adventure, one replete with unsavory components like black water tanks (I never thought I'd become so intimate with sewage) and bug infestations. And while I am happy with my still-life-in-travel-trailer, I don't wish the same for my folks. I want them to be comfortable and at peace - commodities that are in much shorter supply during this era of The Third Depression.