By Rev. Robert Plaisted

Guest Columnist

What will we do when the panic hits? It’s coming, you know, sure as God made little green apples. Merriam-Webster defines panic this way: “sudden, overpowering fright,” “sudden, unreasoning terror often accompanied by mass flight,” or “sudden, widespread fright concerning financial affairs.” All those definitions share characteristics in common. Panic happens suddenly; it overwhelms rational thinking, and it triggers our “fight or flight” emotional response.

Because panic is based in fear, not reason, its effects on human society usually are negative, and they cannot easily be predicted. Ignore our pretensions about “rugged individualism.” We humans are herd animals, and panic causes herd animals to stampede. Newly-elected President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was addressing nationwide panic with his First Inaugural Address in 1933, when he said “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror.”

FDR was trying to keep our parent’s generation from stampeding, like panicky sheep, over a cliff and into the fascist nightmare that was devouring democratic nations around the world. Had he failed, the United States probably wouldn’t have survived the 1930s. America also encountered a fascist “America First” gang back then — same name, same ideology — white supremacist, pro-tyranny, anti-democratic. They might have taken over our government, if it had faltered.

Even though our current national panic is not yet too severe, just give it some time. Another panic is coming that will make the Great Depression look mild. The preconditions already are in place. All we lack is a triggering event, something comparable to the collapse of our economy between 1929 and 1932. That was enough to demolish the swaggering, cocksure optimism of the Roaring Twenties and destroy the faith of most Americans in Republican leadership.

The late 1920s and the early 2020s look eerily similar. Both were dominated by laissez-faire capitalists, arrogant, super-rich people who squandered money with reckless abandon, simply because they could. One thing Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk have in common is that they’ve accumulated more money than they can spend wisely, so they spend it foolishly — undermining Twitter or running a taxi service to space for other rich folks. Add nonsense like crypto currency speculators, corrupt foreign oligarchs and rampant, homegrown fraud, and you have a system rigged for disaster.

The financial community recently spawned a new word, “polycrisis.” It was a major topic of discussion at the recent World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Economic historian Adam Tooze writes that a polycrisis “challenges our ability to cope…the shocks are disparate, but they interact so that the whole is even more overwhelming than the sum of the parts.” Climate change aggravated the COVID pandemic, which helped ignite the war in Ukraine, which interfered with the global economic system to disrupt trading networks and supply chains, which triggered high inflation and food shortages, all of which resulted in the first global population decline since 1945.

Faced with such threats, one of our major political parties, and about a third of our citizens, already have abandoned their faith in our government, threatening to overthrow it violently. Meanwhile, the world remains as chaotic as it was in the 1930s, and exponentially more dangerous because of nuclear weapons. This is neither a time for optimism nor pessimism. They’re just magical thinking — false hope or unfounded despair. Rather, we need realism.

Realists deal with life as it is. Historical precedent suggests we’re on the verge of another panic in America, which could begin as soon as the next few months. If the insurrectionists, who now control the House of Representatives, should send our economic system careening into unprecedented financial default, things will get really bad, really fast, even faster than they did after 1929.

Writing in Esquire, Jack Holmes says, “We’re in dangerous territory when sticking it to Those People is a greater virtue for a big chunk of the body politic than maintaining the full faith and credit of the United States government, which just happens to undergird the world financial system.”

So, my friends, what are you planning to do when the panic hits?

Rev. Robert Plaisted is a retired United Methodist clergyman, formerly of Bridgton, now residing in Bath.