Mental Rainstorms

When the constant news stories of our downward spiral began and the financial quarters went down, I wondered what this time would feel like. Overall, we do not look different. Although, our landscapes are littered with “For Sale” signs, empty lots and 50 percent off sales, we still go about our daily lives in the same ways. Our mental stability has changed but it has yet to change our physical demeanor.

Major news media has named our present economic time the Great Recession, for lack of a better name. Ironically, it seems that the greatest change in our daily lives has not the overbearing appearance of poverty imprinted on our memories to represent the Great Depression, but our mental thinking. It seems no matter what your financial status is, a unique cloud of mental worry hangs over your life. What’s coming next, has replaced what our complacent and supercharged urged to spend. We now have an urge for safety and security that most likely cannot be met. This urge for safety works in different ways in the spectrum of financial situations.

While our world seems to have little physical change, I think what characterizes this time is the things we don’t see. The anxiety plaguing parents about the future of their children and the families stepping in to provide, the recent graduates with little prospects of new careers, it these mental rainstorms that are storming our lives. It’s the working class family evicted from their relatives rental unit for overcrowding and the school cutting back on retirement pay, these are the difficult to see things characterizes our time. These hardships are difficult to capture in film for the next generation to learn, like the famous photographs taken by civil service photographs on work projects.