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Security and the New Depression

Added on 25 April 2008 at 01:17:23, by Charley

Security and the New Depression

My parents never ceased telling me that I must get a good education so I could command a good job with a good company and stick with it for that solid gold retirement pension. Security was the goal, the be-all and end-all.
Decidedly odd advice from my immature vantage point for a two reasons, big reasons.
My father worked for the same company, Bethlehem Steel, for 35 years, working his way up from a boxmaker in the Great Depression to Master Machinist. After 35 years, when he was 62, Bethlehem Steel shut its San Francisco factory and released my father with 25% of his pension.
He was shattered. He had made so many plans for his retirement at 65; he was going to buy a fishing boat and sail the Pacific catching fish, putting in to obscure ports in Northern California, Alaska and Mexico, not hanging around anywhere long enough for mutual irritation to set in.
Instead, he had to take a poorly paid job in a small local engineering shop, far below his skills, and wait for a pension that wouldn’t pay for his dreams. Before that pension even came, he had a series of strokes that left him paralysed and nothing but a burden to my mother for the next ten years.
This was a greater lesson than anything he had told me: Never Trust A Company – any company, ever, to keep a promise, to care a whit about any person. Security was certainly never going to found in the hands of an organisation of faceless creatures comfortably distanced from any shred of humanity.
Okay, that’s the first reason. The second is happier.
My parents were older than the parents of most of my classmates, depression-era rather than World War 2 folks. They also never ceased telling me that the bottom could drop out at any minute; this was why I was supposed to get that good job with that good company and stick with it. The Great Depression was a terrible, terrible thing.
But I realised after years of holiday family gatherings that the stories they told came almost exclusively from those Depression years. All the funny stories, the amazing stories, the love stories, and the adventure stories. Of course, it had something to do with their ages, they were in their late twenties to mid-thirties at the time, but it still made a lasting impression on me. Their Depression life – unsurprisingly – seemed more communal and centred on having a good time at the moment than on working and planning for the future. That was something they wanted to inflict on me but weren’t able to do themselves.
This is backed up by the outpouring of great art of every kind that germinated in the Depression, from brilliant populist music to novels and films. Perhaps there wasn’t enough money around for those corporations to try to control and channel art as has often been the case in the last few decades.
So here’s to the new, oncoming Depression: may we be well served by our new poverty.

Floratone - Swamped

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