This post first appeared on Balloon Juice.
Via Atrios, an excellent post about the recession:
[Recession is] often taken as a big deal in the simple sense that the experience of recession sucks. But, people say, there are lots of bad experiences and this is just one of them. Sometimes we have to suck it up.
My argument is no, this isn’t just another bad experience. Its a failure of our most basic institutions and is leading to pure loss.
It would be as if the door to your apartment was ripped off and heat was spilling out into the atmosphere and people said “Well you know sometimes you have deal with the cold, lets talk about the ideal size of an apartment. Big ones are draftier you know. No small ones cool down too quickly”
What! No! Lets fix the fucking door. Do you understand: the door is missing. This is not the time to argue about ideal apartment size, this is the time to keep our heat from spilling out purposelessly.
I was going to say that the media has a tendency to talk about recession as something that just hurts people’s fee-fees, like the BurlingtonCoat Islamic Center, but in fact the discussion is much worse than that: when recessions hurt fee-fees, they build character—look at the Greatest Generation!—whereas the BurlingtonCoat Islamic Center is a debilitating, irreversible blow to the delicate spirit of Real Murka.
Right now, a few percent of the population is likely being doomed to a life of chronic unemployment. From the discussions politicians and elite media are having right now, I can only conclude that they just don’t give a fuck about that.
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