'09 optimism low, but nice surprises may be coming

We've been pelted with so much bad news lately, coupled by our own paper losses on 401(k) balance sheets, that many of us seem to be entering 2009 as if summoned to the principal's office.

It's rare to begin a year on that note. New years tend to inspire boundless optimism. Oh sure, there was some of that this week. Many of us actually believe we finally are going to drop those 20 extra pounds or so hanging around our middles. It's just that we hope the reason we do it isn't because we no longer can afford to eat.

This sense of foreboding contrasts sharply to the way Americans seemed to feel as 1929 came to a close. The editorial page at this newspaper thought the nation was on the verge of an unprecedented boom.

"Every prospect for 1930 promises a great industrial year, with all private and public agencies pledged to a program of extension and improvement whereby employment and production shall be increased, and the ill effects of the recent speculative crash on Wall Street neutralized," an editorial writer of the day said on New Year's Eve.

I couldn't tell whether he was still working at the paper three years later, or whether he was standing in a bread line sponsored by that program of extension and improvement. But whoever wrote this paper's institutional voice at the end of 1932 obviously had been smacked by reality.

"It has been a terrible year ..." pretty much said it all. That year's editorial urged people to focus on the bright side. "While we cannot individually control prosperity, fortunately it is largely in ourselves to control happiness, which is a spiritual quality, as prosperity is a material one."

Those were sentiments that resonated in the 1930s, at least according to folks I know who lived through them. A lot of people succeeded in separating the idea of happiness from material possessions.

I hope we reach that situation again, but not because we're forced into it.

As much as some people like to speculate that we are heading for another '30s-like Depression, it doesn't have to be so. At the moment, it isn't even close to being so. (At its worst, unemployment during the Depression was at 25 percent, compared to today's 6.7 percent.) The philosopher George Santayana is famous for saying that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. People tend to twist this into the more succinct, "history repeats itself." That isn't true. At least, it doesn't have to be.