Summer 2010 Jo Lee - JO LEE Magazine

THE MARVELOUS MAVERICK
JO LEE Magazine – CELEBRATING 10 YEARS OF LUXURY – DECEMBER 2010
Cinderella, The Financial Crisis
And Global Issues
By H. Gail Regan
Toronto – Canada
The ancient fairytale character
Cinderella is a modern heroine -- she
is hardworking, creative, pleasant,
attractive and above all adaptive. The
story of Cinderella is not only the
story of a girl who lost her parents
and made the best of hard times. It
is a story of failure of institutional
support. Through no fault of her
own, Cinderella’s life was derailed
until she lucked out and resumed her
destiny.
We are now living in a period of
time that economic historians call
the “Second Great Contraction.”
Macroeconomic tools are better
understood and leadership more
competent, so wealth and job loss
have been fractional compared to
the first great contraction, the Great
Depression. But decline is still
huge. We are hardworking, creative,
intelligent citizens and the system
supporting our financial success
evaporated, making Cinderellas of us
all.
I am curious about how the
storybook Cinderella managed
herself post-crisis for this is our
future too. I see three scenarios –
retreat, redirection and projection of
symbolic loss.
Cinderella may have been
overwhelmed by her experience and
have developed into a shy queen,
clinging to her castle. She would
be seen as right wing laissez-faire,
disengaged and uninterested in the
affairs of the kingdom. Similarly,
some of us are seriously set back
by the contraction and will be
economically timid for the rest
of our lives. We may retreat to
social disengagement and political
alienation.
If Queen Cinderella were as spunky
in adulthood as she was in her youth,
she is likely to redirect the psychic
energy her abandonment engendered
to useful projects that have personal
meaning and that will make life
better for her subjects -- children’s
aid, perhaps, and scholarships for
orphans who want to go to college.
Similarly, as our economy recovers,
I expect keen interest in repair of
the support systems that failed --
bank reform perhaps and mortgage
regulation.
Imagine an adult Queen Cinderella
coping with what happened but
vulnerable to a vague sense of loss,
one that she symbolizes to herself.
Her discomfort links not to the
actual loss of her parents, but to the
symbolic loss of ideal parental love,
an experience universal to the human
condition. Psychically, she needs
to see a parental type of authority
actively improving a universal
problem and so do her subjects,
whose parents were likely a whole
lot less ideal than Cinderella’s so
their yearning could be greater. The
Queen’s causes will be popular, left
wing and global. They may not be
especially practical.
My worry is for those of us more
hurt by the symbolic loss of
certainty than the actual losses the
contraction imposed. Will we seek
justice by committing to global
causes that purport to reduce risk
but in fact increase it? The politics
of symbolic loss lead to a quagmire
of unanticipated consequences and
covert vested interest. They are best
left alone, for time heals all wounds.
JL
Jo Lee Summer 2010 17