The Crisis

Abstract

Memory softens past pain and exaggerates profit. The years 1974–76 serve in late 1980s political controversy as a horrid warning — though less so than the over-played ‘winter of discontent’ of 1978–79. But individuals who lived through it recall a dangerous, disorienting time when what counted most was to survive. To recapture the feeling of being without landmarks, somewhere between panic and exaltation, requires an effort of imagination comparable to understanding the consequences of an immense natural disaster, eruption or earthquake.

T’is all in pieces, all coherence gone

(John Donne)