RonL said:
Are we headed for a depression?
I know I am.
I think it is a strange thing to be sitting here, watching all this happen and everyone being aware that it is happening, knowing why it is happening and doing nothing about it. I suspect we started circling the drain a good many years ago and did not realize it. Probably some time during the first Clinton administration, maybe even Bush I. But now we realize it and it probably isn't really too late to fix it, or at least start fixing it.
But we've become so soft, greedy and short sighted that we won't. I think ANWAR is the perfect example. Regardless of how you feel about drilling there, or regardless of how much it would actually help, one of the main political arguments about not doing it had less to do with polar bears and penguins than the fact that it will take ten years to get any production from it. Well guess what, that was 10 years ago folks. Again, I'm not making a case for drilling there, I'm just pointing how how short sighted we are. If a measure can't fix things (and line someone's pockets)
right now, then we don't do it. Or if it looks like it is going to cause some short term pain to achieve long term benefit, then we don't have the guts to do it.
Make no mistake about it, this is not an accidental decline. This is not like the weather. All of this has been man made and precisely orchestrated. I'm not saying any one group or party is trying to push us into a depression. What I'm saying is that there have been plenty of smart and thoughtful people who have been telling us all along, for the last 10 or 20 years (and in some cases 50) that we have been hoeing down the wrong row. Its like telling a child that if he keeps on eating the candy he's going to get a stomach ache. And as a nation, we're behaving just like you'd expect Augustus Gloop to act.
Augustus Gloop - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In the original story Gloop falls into the river of chocolate and is sucked into a huge tube. The trauma of being sucked through the tube changes him from short and fat to tall and thin.
And that's what's going to happen to us. Many people ask why bad things happen. Sometimes troubles and hardships are what make us better and stronger. I hope we come out the other side of this better than we are. I think we will. But its going to hurt a little.
For starters its going to take some leadership we can get behind as a nation. I don't think we've had an inspiring leader since Reagan. In fact, I bet its safe to say that in the last 20 years our presidents have been elected more because people were voting
against their opponent than
for them. And that's a sad state of affairs.
