Depression & Recession

David Brooks wrote recently in the New York Times about the enormous gap between citizens' assessment of the quality of their own life and that of the state of the country. Never has the gap been so large, and I'm not surprised.

Most of the people I know are bummed out, depressed, frustrated, angry because the state of the country seems bleak and gray, and it's beginning to color our attitudes.

We are a country beset by misadventures, malodorous judgements, deceits and fabrications, despicable treatment of people whom we think to be against us, and beyond all this, our civil rights have never been in such a fragile state.

With fourteen months to go in this administration, I suppose we could look forward to the next one. But the parade of candidates suggests that they are insubstantial stylists, driven by polls and professional advisers and not, so far as I am able to discern, by a singular vision of what the country might achieve, or by a sense of hope, bordering on downright optimism, that he or she can make a significant difference in the lives of the average joes and janes who head off to a job, not knowing precisely when it will be outsourced to India or lost in a merger. This is no time for sissies.

But our President threatens and chides - and that's to us Americans. God knows how others around the world perceive him, but he and and his ilk do love to rattle their swords and stomp their little feet.

Yes, it is true that we shall probably not have to live through a great depression, although I'm less certain about our not living through a third world conflict, and we might have to fall back on what we learned from our parents who survived both of those cataclysmic events:

Live simply, work hard, pay cash, vote in every election, and pray that our government finds a way to work for more of us and not so much against us.

What concerns me is that we may not have the right stuff to manage the future, in our bleak house, divided.