The Recession’s Big Test

Every day, another anecdote: Five Banks held up in a single day in New York City, where such robberies are up 54% from last year. Grocers putting electronic tags on sirloin to deter shoplifters. Psychologists predicting more mall violence and workplace rampages. And of course the story that started it all, the Wal-Mart worker trampled by shoppers who pushed past with urgent indifference even as paramedics tried to save him, for there were bargains to be seized.

Mass moral breakdown seems a tidy, symmetrical response to a crisis driven by greedheads and gamblers who blew the bubble that carried us away and politicians who stood by and watched it burst. So now we stand in the rubble, surrounded by sharp questions. How sturdy are we, how suspicious, how brave, how bitter? What is it going to do to us, individually and collectively, when dread takes up residence next door, or right upstairs in the empty rooms we prowl around when we can’t sleep because our debts and doubts are making too much noise? (See pictures of the recession of 1958.)

As a country, we have seen how we can rise to the occasion in a crisis: we saw it seven years ago when our cities came under attack. We’ve felt it in wartime, in natural disasters. But the Great Recession is no short-term, onetime event, to which we respond and move on. It is changing how we think and how we live and how we see one another. Barack Obama based his campaign on the promise to bring people together; the question now is, Can we resist the forces that would pull us apart?

It’s easy to forecast a Darwinian winter, when we lash out or hunker down and shiver even when we sit near the fire. We read about people walking away from mortgages they can afford to pay, just because everyone else is doing it and responsibility seems like a sucker’s game. Retailers report that gun sales are up, because the Democrats are back and crime is expected to rise and civilization as we know it to break down. Someone somewhere is stirring the tar and plucking the feathers for Lehman’s Richard Fuld and Merrill’s Stan O’Neal and of course Bernie Madoff of the $50 billion swindle, because absent any effective sanction, we’re all vigilantes now.

The headlines will always track the mayhem more than the mystery, but if you look at all closely, there’s another story to tell. Maybe the fascination with the rise and fall of the Wall Street titans is that unlike past recessions, this one affects everyone. It’s hard to feel sorry for people for whom retrenchment means shifting from the private jet to commercial first class, but it does mean we’re all having the same conversation, and psychologists point out we’re happier when we’re all in the soup together. The notion that misery loves company may be less about malice than about solace: that problems shared grow smaller, that courage is contagious. Is it just a coincidence that Mississippi, which typically ranks as the most generous state in charitable giving, is also the poorest? To suffer alone is a tragedy; to struggle together is an opportunity, when we find out what we really care about.

It’s possible we’ve reached a moment of creative commiseration. A friend in Iowa was invited to a poverty party–“because why should a worldwide recession spoil all our fun!” the invitation said. Guests were told to bring “a dish to share, a (cheap) bottle of wine, a hard-luck story and a devil-may-care attitude.” We share casserole experiments: food itself becomes communal, everything in the fridge pitching in. You learn a lot about your neighbors when you carpool, and save gas too.

And for every story of swindlers and cheats, dwell for a moment on these: Someone placed an 18-karat-gold diamond ring in the Salvation Army kettle in Uniontown, Pa. A Sioux Falls, S.D., hotel manager came up with a plan to open his doors to 200 homeless people for Christmas. A Santa Clarita, Calif., family took in an 83-year-old woman left homeless by wildfires and helped rebuild her life. Food donations in Paradise, Calif., were up fivefold. “We’ll take a cup of kindness yet,” we sing as we welcome a new year, and never more so than this time. Maybe as times get worse, we get better. Our pain makes us feel other people’s too; our fear lets us practice valor; we are tense, and tender as well. And among the things we can no longer afford are things we never really wanted anyway, like the solitude of snobbery, and the luxury of denial.

See pictures of TIME’s Wall Street covers.

See pictures of the global financial crisis.