We're in the alternative universe we all ......dreamed about....... A Democrat in the White House named Barack Hussein Obama, once rated one of the most liberal members of Congress. Nancy Pelosi, a woman, is speaker of the House and Congress is heavily Democratic. Young, progressives believed in a better day, and from Facebook to the daily paper, cynics and staunch Republicans lost and the Future won.........Won a war that shouldn't have been waged, the worst economy in 70 years and a broken system in dire need of fixing from Wall Street to Main Street. The banks are zombies of their former selves. AIG, once the world's biggest and most respected insurance company is a shadow of it's former self. Hell, Warren Buffet's losing money. A correction on the grandest scale. But let's get some perspective.
- Folks are hurting, but this isn't Katrina. This isn't Bird Flu. This isn't 9-11. The lines at Starbucks are shorter, but plenty of folks are still there ordering $4 coffee drinks.
- The busses and trains are running, mostly on time.
- This isn't 1931 or the old Soviet Union. There aren't the bread lines.
We're okay. We really are. Foreclosures, credit freeze, loss of retirement wealth, these are things that we can recover from. They're causing hardship, no doubt. But there's so much inertia in the wealth in the world that what we're experiencing is a shift, but not really a loss. It's a shift toward Government and away from unlimited free market. It's going to be an era where the rich, get less rich and the middle class get more middle.
The real deadly catastrophic issues created in the wake of a Katrina or a 9-11 cause actual losses. Losses of life, property, treasure and cause us to question the very nature of who we are and what we're doing.
I don't know. I just think that as long as we keep our heads down and keep working on these bundles of legislation, things will turn around and all will be okay in America and the world. The gluttonous late 1990s and the real estate pyramid game of the middle part of this decade are over, long gone, but we'll learn from them.
Imagine if we were hit with the economic events we've seen in the past six months and it was only the first year of a four year Bush term, and the cabinet and the agencies were filled with idiots like they were only a few months ago.........
At least we have a guy with a good head on his shoulders and a champion of our causes.