This Year's Economic Cataclysm

Once again, we've darned near outsmarted ourselves where our investments are concerned, but we live in such nice new houses, with atria galore to be heated and cooled, and drive sophisticated late model vehicles, and travel to such interesting places, mainly with other people's money on our credit cards.

Well, all that supposet codswallop I had to listen to as a kid about "the Great Depression" is vibrating in my noggin again after all these years.

My parents were lucky; my father's family started a successful grocery business about 120 years ago, and even during the Depression people had to eat. But Mom and Dad had lots of pot-luck suppers, played endless evenings of bridge, went to the occasional movie, and managed to get through the hard times without too much damage. I wore "darn socks" during the war, having no clue about what "darning" really was.

Have you notice that nobody's using the term Depression these days? Well if we're not economically depressed, we sure are emotionally. At church yesterday we heard that the people served a free hot meal - no questions asked - had doubled in the last six months. Every index of bad is up, and every index of good seems to be down.

So we need to look to ourselves, cut back on our borrowed style of living, reduce our debt, eat simpler, spend less, and look out for those whose concerns make ours seem modest.

The wise Pogo, whom I quote often, said "We have met the enemy, and he is us." True enough, but I prefer to believe that if we were stupid enough to get into this mess, with a little elbow grease and commitment to the greater good, we might have enough intelligence to get ourselves out of it.

Well...until the next era of stupid.