Economic Metaphor: You Can't Go Home Again

This doesn't have much to do with the AEC industry or marketing per say, but rather is an interesting and well-written point of view I thought I'd share considering our present economic conditions:


"America, in the fall of 1929, was like a cicada. It had come to an end and a beginning. On October 24th, in New York, in a marble-fronted building down on Wall Street, there was a sudden crash that was heard throughout the land. The dead and outworn husk of the America that had been cracked and split right down the back, and the living, changing, suffering thing within -- the real America, the America that had always been, the America that was yet to be -- began now slowly to emerge. It came forth into the light of day, stunned, cramped, crippled by the bonds of its imprisonment, and for a long time it remained in a state of suspended animation, full of latent vitality, waiting, waiting patiently, for the next stage of its metamorphosis."

"The leaders of the nation had fixed their gaze so long upon the illusions of a false prosperity that they had forgotten what America looked like. Now they saw it -- saw its newness, its raw crudeness, and its strength -- and turned their shuddering eyes away. "Give us back our well-worn husk," they said, "where we were so smug and comfortable." And then they tried word-magic. "Conditions are fundamentally sound," they said -- by which they meant to reassure themselves that nothing now was really changed, that things were as they always had been, and as they always would be, forever and ever, amen."

"But they were wrong. They did not know that you can't go home again."

-- Thomas Wolfe, from You Can't Go Home Again