The iconoclastic and cynical James Howard Kunstler is fond of mocking people who ask for “hope” and insists that any hope we have in the face of the end of the world as we know it (EOTWAWKI) must come from within. I’m not sure what that means to Kunstler, but I’m getting clearer about what it means to me.

Naïve hope takes myriad forms and from my perspective one example is the hope that impeachment of Cheney and Bush is even possible. And I must add that Bush has not lost his “brain” with the departure of Rove. Who needs a brain when Darth Vader is the real man behind the curtain and has more political and economic power in the United States government than the average American can even imagine? Another example of false hope is faith in the U.S. political system and the possibility that clean elections exist, not to mention the hope that one will even happen in 2008. Other “hopes” include: the hope that the Democrats will finally find their spine, that the economy will improve without the working and middle classes being eviscerated by a financial meltdown as catastrophic or worse than the Great Depression, that technology will solve the energy dilemma, that moving to another country guarantees personal safety and human liberty, that the human race can exist for another century without a nuclear exchange, that a global spiritual awakening will occur in time to transform the human race and avert catastrophe.

As long as we are hoping for any of these, we are assuming a passively reactive position. Conversely, a pro-active mindset is willing to own that the paradigm upon which the empire is based is not only shallow, wanton, mindless, and infantilizing, but ultimately toxic-mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and physically. A truly pro-active mindset comes down to the question that film maker Tim Bennett leaves us with at the end of What A Way To Go: Life At The End Of Empire which is: “WHO do I want to be as the world as I know it comes to an end?” Do I want to find myself literally or metaphorically like a 2005 New Orleans resident crouched on one tiny dry corner of my rooftop waiting for a government helicopter to rescue me from an inundated house, or do I want to see the hurricane coming and take myself to another location, that is, another mindset? Do I want to assume that somehow citizens of empire can keep a show on the road that should be canceled and run out of town? Do I want to abdicate personal responsibility because I’ve been taught from childhood to be a good citizen and vote in elections because two different political parties exist, and I live in one of the few countries on earth where I have a “real” choice between them? Do I want to kick and scream against the death of the world as I know it, or embrace that death so that something else has a chance to be born-even if I’m not alive to witness the birth?

Specifically, the mindset to which I’m referring is one that understands and feels in the marrow of one’s bones that the life/death/rebirth cycle is as inherent in one’s existence as breath itself. We can talk about collapse-and we must-but we can also re-frame it into the broader concept of life/death/rebirth. No, this does not have to be some airy-fairy, sweet-lemon rationalization that ultimately produces a new form of denial. Perhaps taking a moment to ponder birth will be helpful. Birth is bloody, uncertain, scary, painful, exhausting, and usually requires more courage, stamina, strength, and perseverance than most women ever thought they had. And–I cannot think of a better description of the collapse of empire.

This birth-giving mindset has been stolen from us by empire and replaced with obedience to government; trust in economic, social, and political systems; the perception of ourselves as consumers who are entitled to be comfortable and stress-free with access to the latest technological toys which make our lives fun, exciting, and painless. As I write these words, I recall an email I received earlier today from a woman in South Africa who has to rely on an “if-y” dial-up internet connection and who thanked me for my recent articles on collapse, adding that living among impoverished native South Africans reminds her daily of how Americans will be forced to live during and after collapse.

I strongly recommend an interview with Joanna Gabriel of Ashland, Oregon entitled “Who Am I In A Post-Petroleum World?“, which offers an extraordinary articulation of collapse as opportunity for rebirth or in her words, a crisis “which is forcing us to create the kind of world we wanted all the time anyway.”

A great American poet, William Stafford, wrote a poem that could not be more appropriate for this moment entitled “A Ritual To Be Read To Each Other.” I promise you that if you read and ponder this poem every day for one week, you will find yourself moving farther away from hope and closer to mindset.

A Ritual To Be Read To Each Other
by William Stafford, from “The Darkness Around Us Is Deep”

If you don’t know the kind of person I am
and I don’t know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the
world
and following the wrong god home we may miss
our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dike.

And as elephants parade holding each
elephant’s tail,
but if one wanders the circus won’t find the
park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something
shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should
consider—
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the
dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to
sleep;
the signals we give—yes or no, or maybe—
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

The poem begins with a warning about what we risk if we do not engage in deep listening and truth-telling with each other: We may follow the pattern that others made and then follow the wrong god home and miss our star. The small (and enormous) betrayals of us by our culture have deeply wounded us, and like elephants in a parade, we need to hold onto each other lest our mutual lives become lost, and the surest way to become lost is to “know what occurs but not recognize the fact.” As Stafford reminds us at the end of the poem, it is important that awake people be awake or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep. We must be constantly vigilant and support each other in remaining vigilant so that we do not fall back into comfortable slumber. The signals must be clear because the darkness around us is deep-so deep in fact, that we dare not settle for anything less than mindset.

That means voluntarily, intentionally stepping into collapse-physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually, not allowing it to be something that “just happens” to us, but an opportunity that we embrace, despite all the suffering it will entail for ourselves and the people around us. As I listen to the various economic pundits discuss the current stock market meltdown, I notice how they consistently speak of “the opportunities” that exist in the midst of the grim financial landscape. Like financial investing, there are no guarantees that our investment in the opportunities of collapse will prove to be advantageous, and like investing, our willingness to step into collapse involves risk. But the choice is ours: Do we invest in mindset, or do we rely on hope? Hope which serves no practical purpose except guaranteeing that collapse will be nothing more momentous for us than the end of the world as we have known it.

[T]hat quaint period, the thirties, when the huge middle class of America was matriculating in a school for the blind. Their eyes had failed them, or they had failed their eyes, and so they were having their fingers pressed forcibly down on the fiery Braille alphabet of a dissolving economy.

– Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie

William Faulkner famously stated that “good history is, not was.” By this Faulkner meant that history is a tapestry of interconnected events whose meaning and significance cannot be appreciated unless past causes, present manifestations, and future consequences are assessed. Robert S. McElvaine, author of The Great Depression: America 1929-1941, provides us with the kind of tapestry to which Faulkner was alluding as McElvaine analyzes the first momentous collapse the United States ever experienced.

I was recently gifted with this book by a friend who thought that as an historian, I would appreciate it and find it timely, and certainly I do, but due to current events and how rapidly they are unfolding, my comments about it here will not be from an academic perspective. I am much less interested in the quality of history in McElvaine’s book, although I find it first-rate, and more interested in the values the author is emphasizing and that the Great Depression manifested among the masses of American people. You might say that I have been touched by and wish to share the soul of this book, more than its intellect. For that reason, I choose to describe this article as a commentary rather than a review of the book.

One cannot thoroughly appreciate the catastrophic nature of the Great Depression without understanding what preceded it. The decade of the 1920s, not unlike the economic milieu of the 1980s and ‘90s, was a time of dizzying, unrestrained, and frantic consumption. It was the apotheosis of the “conspicuous consumption” about which Thorstein Veblen wrote in his turn-of-the-century classic The Theory Of The Leisure Class. Threading his tapestry forward, McElvaine writes that, “Put simply, most Americans late in the twentieth century have adopted the consumption ethic that was rising in the 1920s, but was temporarily reversed during the Great Depression.” McElvaine, of course, wrote this book in the ‘80s, but certainly the consumption ethic has not abated but rather intensified since then.

Ironically, one factor that contributed to the onset of the Depression, and that eventually pulled the nation out of it, was consumption. Franklin Roosevelt’s stellar accomplishment in the engineering of New Deal policies was the emphasis on “purchasing power” for average Americans. McElvaine occasionally draws parallels throughout the book, and also in recent articles, between the 1920s and the late twentieth century, not only with regard to consumption but also to a stock market index that seemed during the 1920s to reach unprecedented heights. Clearly, the consumption on steroids that we have been witnessing the past sixty years in the United States is no longer capable of “curing” an economic depression, but it is certainly capable, along with mountainous debt, of contributing to the occurrence of a Second Great Depression.

Elevated levels of consumption are almost always attended by an increase in “individualism” and a decline in a sense of community. The Great Depression reversed this trend in America dramatically, and for me, that is perhaps the most riveting feature of McElvaine’s book as he writes, “…the most significant fact about the Depression era may well be that it was the only time in the twentieth century during which there was a major break in the modern trends towards social disintegration and egoism.” (xxiii)

From the perspective of today’s world, whenever I reflect on the 1930s, I never cease to be amazed at the spirit of cooperation that blossomed amid the hardship and impoverishment of the times. Of this McElvaine notes: “The economic collapse that started in 1929 obliged people who had begun to accept the new values of unlimited consumption and extreme individualism to take another look at these beliefs in comparison with the more traditional, community-oriented values that had existed in earlier times.” (xxiv) The author also notes that many men who had become unemployed and found themselves spending more time at home also found themselves in the position that women had traditionally experienced — that is, at the bottom of the economic hierarchy. Whereas the Horatio Alger-style self-made man was championed in the Victorian era, during the Depression the “self-made man became the self-destroyed man.” (xxiv) In other words, during the Depression, people began to recognize the value and necessity of interdependence, which manifested in a preference not for the highly individualistic urban lifestyle, but for rural and small-town life.

I don’t wish to romanticize the Great Depression era as some golden age of cooperation and community, but I do believe there are applicable lessons to be learned from the way in which communities responded to the suffering of their time, particularly as we stand on the shifting sands of a cliff called “collapse.” As I have said many times, collapse is not an event but a process — a process which is not in the future but in which we are deeply engaged at this moment whether we recognize it or not. And imperfect as the spirit of interdependence may have been in the Depression era, it was, as McElvaine emphasizes, “…the time in which the values of compassion, sharing, and social justice became the most dominant that they have ever been in American history.” (7) Conversely, “…more and more people became dependent as the nation industrialized.” (7)

As the friend who gave me this book stated, “This book reveals very poignantly what has been lost in American culture.” He was referring above all to the issue of cooperative values, and values is something historians often avoid addressing in their frantic attempt to remain “objective.” Yet, as McElvaine notes, “Values are the critical base on which any society rests.” (196) Unfortunately, American capitalism itself is a poster-child for the schizophrenia between economics and ethics.

America in the 1920s was capitalism on steroids with the ruling elite gorging on corporate profits, most notably profits from the automobile and related industries. Three presidents in a row, Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover had agreed that “the business of America is business.” Yet when the house of cards collapsed in 1929, the working and middle classes, alongside intellectuals who had been criticizing capitalism for some time, awakened to the nightmare that the American dream had become. Not surprisingly, countless working and middle class individuals moved dramatically to the left politically, many embracing socialism and organizing and protesting for economic and social justice. Why else during the McCarthy era was the ‘30s referred to as the Red Decade? (203)

And of course, gangsters of the Depression era were portrayed in film as Robin Hoods. The 1960s cinematic portrayal of support for and idealization of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrows was not exaggerated. In my family, I grew up on an often-told and retold tale of my grandmother’s matter-of-fact statement that “if John Dillinger knocks on my door, I’ll give him a hot meal and a place to hide down in the cellar behind the furnace.” The Depression brought people — all kinds of people — together and kept them together.

One of the most powerful and moving pieces of cinema in the ‘30s was King Vidor’s Our Daily Bread in which a young unemployed husband and his wife (John and Mary) living in the city become desperate for income. John appeals to Mary’s rich uncle who gives them several acres of land, which they are totally unskilled in farming. But along comes a farmer from a Midwestern state on his way to California with his family who joins them and begins teaching them how to farm. Soon the population of the farm grows and more and more unemployed, wandering individuals wind up on John and Mary’s land looking for not only a new start, but a sense of community with which to launch it. Together, the farm’s residents survive by hunting, growing their own food, and sharing skills. A series of challenges arises, but each time, the community moves through them — except for the most formidable of all, drought. However, near the farm is a reservoir, but the community has no way to access it. Therefore, they must construct a conduit from the reservoir to their crops — a gargantuan project that has them working day and night with picks and shovels routing the water to their land.

For me, the most powerful and moving scene in the film was the long brigade of men digging with their shovels and the coordinated thud of their picks into the earth, toiling around the clock, to bring water to their land. I’ll never forget the sound of those picks reverberating with sweat, determination, and above all, cooperation. They were successful, and their crops flourished, but only because they never gave up on creating a new life, and they never stopped working together to do so.

Today, no movement offers any viable alternatives for political, economic, social, or ecological justice. Few are even cognizant of the severity of the issues at hand, and most are woefully unprepared and uninformed. A frightening and naïve assumption prevails: that the U.S. government will “take care” of its citizens in the throes of natural disasters, pandemics, blackouts, or dirty bomb attacks. These realities could exacerbate one’s angst as one contemplates collapse, but in fact, they might instead motivate us to begin building the lifeboats we must have in order to navigate it. We will not be able to do this until we have experienced a profound transformation of our values — and our sense of community.

Historians generally agree that Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and Keynesian economics rescued the nation from total catastrophe, but McElvaine points out that, “the changing mix of American values in the Depression — was of even more significance than was Roosevelt himself.”(324) Roosevelt’s agenda would have fallen on deaf and smug ears ten years earlier, and it could not have succeeded without a change in values in the American people that was able to resonate with the values of the New Deal. I hasten to add that I do not believe that it was the New Deal that ultimately pulled the nation out of the Depression, for as I make clear in my book U.S. History Uncensored, it was ultimately World War II and the launching of the military industrial complex that did so and has continued to “prevent” depressions and mask more protracted, less visible economic and social injustice.

“Perhaps the chief impact of the Great Depression,” says McElvaine, “was that it obliged the American people to face up to the necessity of cooperative action because it took away, at least temporarily, the easy assumptions of expansion and mobility that had decisively influenced so much of past American thinking.” (337) Expansion? Mobility? Do these sound like aspects of American life that could be severely curtailed by energy depletion, climate change, or an increasingly worthless U.S. dollar?

Mainstream economists have just begun to use the “R” word in relation to the economy, but anyone who has done even minimal research, with or without a degree in economics, understands that the United States — in fact many nations on earth –are moving rapidly toward a Second Great Depression. It is therefore imperative to understand the causes and effects of the First Great Depression, particularly its impact on the culture and the values of individuals in it.

The author goes on to point out the “feminization” of American society during the Great Depression, noting that, “The self-centered, aggressive, competitive ‘male’ ethic of the 1920s was discredited. Men who lost their jobs became dependent in ways that women had been thought to be.” (340) Yet it was not only in loss of jobs that men became more “feminized.”

Whenever any individuals, male or female, join to create community in a spirit of cooperation, they are “feminizing”, for the feminine principle is, above all, relational — a concept inherent in the traditions of many indigenous peoples. It is this kind of joining that characterized the Great Depression era and to which we must aspire as we build economic, emotional, and spiritual lifeboats for the daunting journey ahead.

There will be no New Deal, no FDR, no parental federal government to kiss everything and make it better. There will only be ourselves and the others with whom we choose to join and prepare.