We're all good little middle-class types. We play by the rules and do the right thing, we work hard, we're responsible, we do our share and pull our weight. We defer gratification and postpone our needs and wants--sometimes until after we're dead! We do our best to carve out a safe niche for ourselves and our families in what we know is essentially a chaotic and indifferent universe.

And we know perfectly well we're on our own. For the most part, we don't have access to the extended families and community support our ancestors relied on. We substitute as best we can by the institutions our culture has developed, the state, and by our own efforts. It may not be as comforting as what was traditionallly available to our grandparents, although their world was not without hazard either, by any means; we often tend to idealize the past and fondly recall a time that never really existed.

The economic crises we currently face give us an opportunity to pause and reflect at just how successful we have been at erecting the lines of defenses we have put between ourselves and the potential chaos around us. We spend much time here on the zone arguing who's at fault, and what to do about it, but let's get past that now and simply consider how it affects us individually, or as families. History may be, at least in part, the result of human decisions and philosophy; but at the scale of one person, or one household, it is a vast flowing river we swim in and our control is limited to what we can do with the flotsam bobbing alongside us. The economic world is reduced to money, and this is the medium in which we perceive our lives evolving (at least, until a loved one dies, or that spot on the xray, or the stabbing pain, reminds us of what really matters).

In the economic universe, the first line of defense is the career, which we have spent a lifetime developing and refining. It is what we carry in our minds and hands, and which can never be taken away from us, what reassures us that as long as we have something of value to contribute to the world, that world cannot afford to abandon us entirely. Surely, we will always have that. The second line of defense is our work. Even if our career is obsolete, or we are forced to abandon it for any reason, we can always earn our living and meet our obligations by honest labor. As long as we are willing and able to work, our families are safe, and the center will hold. Surely, we can always do that.

We all tell ourselves this, but none of us truly believes it. So we develop additional lines of defense, like the concentric rings of walls surrounding a medieval town. We save, we invest, we insure, we maintain and upgrade our physical and personal infrastructure. We direct as much of our surplus resources as we can to rebuilding and strengthening those walls, to erecting battlements and towers, bastions and redoubts, massive gates and an impregnable keep. We bravely prepare for a future, and even though we can always conceive of some flood that will effortlessly sweep it all away, we are brave about that too. We do what we can, endure what we must and trust to luck for the rest.

But our economic fortifications are crumbling. Our careers may no longer have relevance to a modern world. Pure employment gets scarcer by the day. Our investments lose value as we gaze helplessly on them and our savings are threatened by both the health of the institutions we have chosen to shelter them and by the government we set up to protect them. The very value of what we have accumulated in our vaults is eroding, as if our gold is being alchemically inflated to base iron. We have met our obligations and now we suspect those who have obligations to us, who owe us for what we have been paying them, who have profited by selling us security, are now going to be unable to deliver. Will we be forced to compete for what's left with those who never cared and did nothing to protect themselves from this eventuality?

Our youth sees no future, our aged see the loss of everything they worked for, and those in between see a life devoid of meaning with no end in sight. This has happened before, many times. This is the human condition, it happened to my parent's generation, and it was followed by the most destructive war the world had ever seen. Eventually they prevailed, then prospered, but it marked them, affected them deeply. Now it may be our turn to follow them through that same crucible. They hastily rebuilt their crumbled walls and towers, stronger than ever before, but now with the knowledge they were not impregnable.