Cecil Bothwell

The sinking of the global economy has barely begun to sink in.

Numbers representing the dollar losses are so big they have become meaningless to most of us. While we are offered comparisons to the Great Depression, those too become meaningless in the face of our very different circumstances today. We are in uncharted waters and the boat is going down.

The easiest future to imagine is a return to the status quo ante. It is a recent past in which we learned to be comfortable. Unfortunately, we don’t have the means to go back. The boat really is going down, and we no longer have the tools or the money to build a new one.

Our economy, our entire way of life, was built on cheap and abundant energy. No matter what the price at the pump might be today, cheap, abundant energy is history. (Look for prices to spike again later this year.)

Sadly, we used the credit card our parents gave us (to buy gas in a pinch) to run up debt on the rest of our purchases as well, and in the memory bubble of easy credit we bid up prices, imagined we had created real value, and then borrowed against that as well. There wasn’t ever a there there.

As Jimi Hendrix sang it, “Castles, built out of sand, fall into the sea, eventually.” Well, the wave came in and the wave washed out, the castle dissolved and the boat went down.

We are here on the beach. What to do?
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Cecil Bothwell, a member of Asheville City Council and a self-proclaimed progressive-libertarian, is running for the Democratic nomination for the seat now held by U.S. Rep. Heath Shuler, D- Waynesville.