I find the timing of this potential financial disaster interesting.
What some are calling a potential second "Great Depression" is happening eighty years after the stock market crash of 1929, which ushered in the first "Great Depression."
Eighty years. That means anyone who was old enough to understand the consequences of that terrible time would have to be in their nineties or older today. We don't have too many ninety year olds around, and certainly very few in their hundreds. And few of those who have lived to that age are still intellectually sharp enough to be able to discuss with us what is happening.
So it seems that we learn for a while after a disaster how not to repeat it, but as the population that suffered through a disaster ages and fades from the sphere of influence, we have to learn the lesson all over again. In this case, it has taken eighty years to put us on the verge of another "Great Depression.
Perhaps we could call this the eighty year rule.
I think of other disasters that happened less than eighty years ago and could come back some day: another World War, a nuclear Cold War, fascist dictatorships in Europe, and even the Holocaust.
It doesn't bode well for us unless we start living much longer, or start doing something very differently.
