Looking out for each other

Who has my back?

We all need a little help sometimes. Well, actually all the time.

So I don't mind tossing a few billion to Wall Street, you know, I have a heart, but who's looking out for me, or you?

This economic mess is about that.

I hope this morning's financial news is better than last week's tsunami, but regardless, we are going to be a long time in a dark hole looking for a light.

In the short term people are asking where to put their money, if they have any, and how much pain is likely to trickle down to them.

But in the long term we have to relearn how interdependent we are. We have to value looking out for each other, not because it will give us a nice warm feeling inside, but because bad things happen when we don't.

A long time ago, we had a big financial collapse called the Great Depression, which happened because our economy and our values got out of whack.

It hurt so much that the country was shocked into putting a bridle on capitalism and creating programs in which we helped each other buy homes, get work, put food on the table, get an education.

Those programs not only helped individuals, but they helped the entire country prosper.

Some people prospered so much that they forgot the lessons of the Depression. Hubris set in.

Too many Americans embraced a distorted view of freedom — freedom from social responsibility. And now our chain has been yanked.

Last week, John McCain said greed on Wall Street caused our economic disaster and he promised to put an end to greed.

Since we have followed Alice down the rabbit hole, I suppose it falls to me to put in a good word for greed — or at least for the desire to prosper.

That desire fuels our economic system. It drives people to produce products, provide services, generate jobs.

This explosion was caused by people going beyond that, making money without producing anything else, or worse, in ways that destroy other people's prospects.

Greed is built into our system and no one is going to kill it off, but it can be controlled.

We are hurting enough to do that now. We even have a Republican administration taking over corporations and railing against CEOs and bankers.

But the entire culture needs adjustment. People in the middle point at CEOs, but don't we share some of the same attitudes?

One evening last week, I listened to several residents of public housing in Seattle talk about the difficulty they have feeding themselves.

The meeting was staged to press budget-cutting local governments to remember poor people. Who's going to bail them out?

I imagined many people in the middle class might look at them the way CEOs look at us. I got mine, you get yours.

Now most of us are just watching and hoping someone has our interests in mind, and maybe becoming wiser about who we ask to watch the store.

We all hold stock in each other.

Jerry Large's column appears Monday and Thursday. Reach him at 206-464-3346 or jlarge@seattletimes.com.