How the Credit Crisis is (Sort Of) Like 9/11

Filed in archive General on October 1, 2008

Photo courtesy of iStockphoto, Image# 7292192

Like everyone, I remember where I was on September 11, 2001. I was working out of my house in a suburb of Chicago, and it just so happens my kitchen was being remodeled. I watched the events of 9/11 with the guys who were tearing apart my kitchen. Normally I wouldn't specifically remember those guys, but now I do.

Anyway... although the events of 9/11 started in New York, it was soon D.C, and then a plane going down in a field in Pennsylvania. Irrational as this may have been, I had the feeling a plane could come crashing down on my home at that moment, so surreal and inexplicable were these events. Who knew what might happen next? Suddenly, nowhere felt safe.

Maybe it's wrong to make a connection between 9/11 and the current "credit crisis", and I do it with the full knowledge that the events of 9/11 were life-and-death events filled with horror for those who experienced them first-hand. My point isn't to say that they are at all the same - it's to say that for those of us who weren't directly affected, those events began as a curiosity on television when the first plane hit, then grew to a fear that these events really could show up on our doorstep.

As we've watched this credit crisis unfold, there's a similar feeling. Not that this crisis could actually extinguish our lives, but a growing realization that what began as us shaking our heads from afar at the greed of Wall Street and the stupidity of Willy-nilly subprime mortgages could now morph into a financial crisis that will personally touch us, that really could change our way of life for the worse.

Maybe it's too dramatic of a connection. I don't believe anything in my lifetime will touch our collective lives in the way that September 11th did. But in the way that distant events suddenly feel like they could come crashing through your door, I see a similarity.