The Spider Web

The recent economic troubles are hitting my industry particularly hard. In my business, hiring and overtime freezes have been instituted and layoffs have started. Business is really bad; we’ve suffered our worse month in recent memory. It’s very scary. Gut-clenching, nail-biting, “this-is-real” scary. Fear of being unable to maintain my family’s current economic position in society is a real, literal, almost physical thing. This could hurt me and my loved ones bad.

There are other factors, too. The housing depression’s hurting us. We bought high, almost five years ago, and I can only hope our house is worth what we paid for it. Thinking we’d make a profit on the sale, right now, is unreasonable. So, we’re locked in this expensive corner of the country for now. I have a high mortgage, my property taxes go up every year (I shudder to think what effect an Obama presidency will have on that monthly check. Blood. Stone. You know the rest). I’m hesitant to check the current value of my 401k. Then there’s my hospital bills, a newborn, the Little One in an excellent but pricey school … I don’t know how we make it happen. But we do, barely. There’s no safety net.

This has me thinking about a spider web. A big one, long silky strands that you can see only when you face them at certain angles. As you travel to the center they get more and more dense, interlocking and crossing paths. It sways in the breeze and at first glance it looks pretty secure. Even a strong wind doesn’t break it. It holds. It stays where it was meant to be, though that looks like a haphazard construction. It fills all the holes and empty spaces, and it does what it was designed to do, what it is supposed to do.

What happens when a little bug lands on a far corner of the web? It sends a slight vibration, a little tremble up the connecting strands, through the center, and eventually resonates through the whole damn thing. What if I were to walk up to the web and, with my hand, grab one or two strands that seem to be anchoring it to a tree or branch or whatever, and yank hard enough to tear them off. The whole web feels it. If I yank hard enough, or grab enough strands, the whole web undulates. Harder still, and it eventually collapses, destroyed.

The web is our economy, of course. But what scares me most with this metaphor is that little bug that torques the web by landing on it. You know what that bug is? Emotion. Human emotion. Fallible human emotion. Our economy fundamentally sits upon a mantle constructed from the aggregate emotional quotient of our society. You may think the foundation is money, but it isn’t. You may think the foundation is reason, but it ain’t that, either. It’s emotion. Everything we do, including everything we do economically from purchasing to saving to investing to chatting up friends, neighbors and coworkers about the economy, falls back on emotion.

So what has this little pessimistic meditation on the Great Credit Crunch of ’08 done? It’s given a teeny tiny bit of its self to the mass of emotion that’s roiling up in the American consumer at this very point in time. I’ll talk to my wife, she’ll talk to others, maybe a handful of people will read this. You get the point. But is there a bigger point? What the heck am I getting at, besides griping about how bad I have it as if it compares at all to what my grandparents went through? (It’ll probably compare nicely to the malaise the country endured during the Carter presidency.)

Maybe there is no point. But I could take this opportunity to clasp your shoulder, lift you up and prop you up (giving strength to others is a good way to feel strong yourself, even if you aren’t) and say, boldly, “There is a better way!”

This.