Lately I’ve heard a lot of people saying that we’re entering another Great Depression. This always irritates me, because these people — and myself — have no idea what a Depression is really like. My great-grandmother, however, does. She was so affected by it that to this day she hardly throws anything away. She holds onto nightgowns, slippers and clothing until they’re worn thin, and even then she hesitates to part with them. More often than not you’ll see her using them as rags for cleaning.
Even my grandmother, who was born well after we’d begun to recover, remembers growing up eating lots of potato-based meals. My mother, who was very close with her grandparents, remembers the same. During the Depression, there was hardly enough meat to go around. I’m pretty sure that while we are having trouble buying goodies — like ice cream and xmas presents — we are still relatively well-fed.
Yes, we are at a relatively low percentage of employment. A recent article in the Republican-American stated that our national unemployment rate has increased by 15%. However, those stats also count people who are already unemployed.
Our newspapers are also dying out, which has been causing many layoffs recently. Unfortunately times have changed and where people once turned to print for information, they can now get that information much faster on the internet. Some newspapers don’t have the resources or the understanding to adapt, and that is why we are losing so many.
But we are not entering a repeat of the Great Depression. We have entered a recession, similar to the one we struggled with during the 70′s. My mom told me it was much like this one: people were going beyond the limits on their credit cards, overspending, signing into mortgages they couldn’t afford, and the government stepped in to try and “help” them. History has shown us that we can’t do that; we have to allow people to get out of their own messes, otherwise it throws everything else off.
I think we are currently standing on the edge of a whole new era, similar to the Renaissance or when the internet first was born and caught fire. I think we are facing something that can only be good, as long as we are able to adapt to it. The only entities — be it newspaper or small business — that will survive this new dawn will be the ones who are able to grab hold of the resources available to them on the internet and make use of them. Everyone else will be left behind. We are leaving the age of printed news, and (hopefully) overspending on our credit cards (at least, until the next recession).
This is a time, in fact, for us web designers and programmers to flourish. Sooner or later businesses are going to realize that they need to move forward with the internet rather than work against it, and we need to be ready to guide these new clients through this process.
Which means I ought to finish my business’s website sometime soon. 
