Main Street is also in denial

This morning I went to pass out food baskets with my local community outreach program. I walked into a gymnasium filled with boxes of food. People throughout the community contributed canned food, boxed food and fresh food. The kids had decorated the boxes and volunteers filled them with enough food to make a nice Thanksgiving dinner. Other boxes were filled with staples - flour, sugar, rice, beans, etc. There were freezers full of turkeys. I was impressed as always at the generosity of the people in my community. We moved the food to the loading dock and waited for people to come by for them. Several of the volunteers I was talking to had also lost their jobs and I thought they would nod with understanding when I said that this was not an ordinary downturn, that the half a quadrillion dollar shadow banking system had to be put on the books and dealt with before it would start getting better. They didn't believe me. I shut up.

This afternoon, one of my ex-co-workers called me and told me how she was stunned by the layoff. She had talked to several others in her group that had been let go and they were equally stunned and completely unprepared to find another job. I said I hoped that she had plenty of savings because it was going to take a long time to find another job. She said that she was ok because her husband still had his job and now that she didn't have to pay day care, they were ok, but that some of the other people she talked to were in debt up to their eyeballs and were living paycheck to paycheck. And some of these people were making six figures.

Nobody gets it until it happens to them.