How I Really Feel

I’m so sick of all the bad news, and I’m not alone.

I’m not denying economic reality—a handful of people on Wall Street, in the mortgage industry, and elsewhere, have tanked our economy, taking down millions of jobs and billions of savings along with it.

It’s the despair that I can’t accept.

This is still America, the nation that, as Ronald Reagan once said, “people vote with their feet to get into every day. I don’t see anybody trying to break into Soviet Russia.”

I empathize with those who, like me, have witnessed their savings and home value plummet, and even more so with those who have lost their jobs.

And yet, I’m reminded of Napoleon Hill’s words in Think And Grow Rich: “For every sorrow, there is the seed of an equivalent benefit.”

So what good can come from our economic plight?

Some ideas:

Maybe we’ll be a little more grateful for what we have, instead of buying into the envy and insecurity that consumer advertising promotes…and then buying everything in sight.

Maybe if we can’t sell our homes, we’ll stay put instead of yelling the good ‘ol American battle-cry of “I’m outta here!”

Maybe we’ll finally get to know our neighbors. It’s tough to love your neighbor as yourself if you don’t know who the hell he is. Right now, we’ve got a society-wide case of overdeveloped wings and underdeveloped roots.

Maybe we’ll abandon our addiction to impossibly cheap goods from overseas, that could only have been made in sweatshop, child labor law-violative conditions, and we’ll bring the jobs back home.

Maybe we’ll get over our collective prejudice against people who come here to work and contribute to society and take care of their families, now that we’re all pretty much in the same boat that they are.

Maybe we’ll be a little slower to commit blood and treasure in wars that kill and maim Americans by the thousands and our “enemies” by the tens or hundreds of thousands.

Who won the Iraq War? Halliburton. Blackwater.

And ultimately, Iran, because we did in six weeks what they couldn’t do in a decade—dismantle Iraq and leave its oil industry for Tehran to control. Anybody recall when our peace dividend’s gonna kick in? Any day now, right?

Maybe our automakers will make vehicles people actually need and desire, if they can survive the twin death sentences of their own folly and free government money.

Maybe we’ll demand a more scrupulous regulatory system on Wall Street, so that financial “products” of no societal value don’t have the power to destroy the economy.

(If you think the mortgage loan crisis is bad, start Googling “swaps”—a highly risky “investment” in the same way that betting on red at the roulette table is an “investment.” Entire nations, including Japan, China, and Finland, have lost billions and billions of dollars investing in swaps, a story too arcane for average news readers…but a desperately important story for everyone to know about.

Maybe we’ll bail out average Americans, instead of the financial institutions that put us into this unholy mess. Right now, it’s like the old Chrysler ads from the 1980s—“Tank the economy…get a check.”

Maybe we’ll stop allowing our former leaders—I’m talking about you, Mr. and Ms. Clinton—from feasting at the trough of every nation under the sun, amassing 10-figure net worths, and then pretending not to be beholden to all those who wrote the checks.

As the late Sam Ervin, the North Carolina Senator who chaired the Watergate hearings said, “Whose bread I eat, his song I sing.”

Maybe we’ll stop trusting everything we read in the newspaper or everything that the government says, whether it’s about the existence of WMD in Iraq or the stability of the housing market (at least until the bubble burst).

Right now, the government and the major media use each other as echo chambers to tell lies and reinforces those lies as truth by citing one another. (See Senator Mike Gravel’s new book,The Kingmakers, for more about the disturbing ways that the media and the government teamed up to sell you the war in Iraq and other tragedies.)

Maybe we’ll stop shopping to impress ourselves and each other, stop spending on average 20 percent more than we make each year, and recognize that the best things in life, as the expression goes, aren’t things.

Maybe we’ll stop confusing credit cards with cash.

Maybe we’ll remember that when God made us in His image, He wasn’t wearing Calvin Kleins.

And that you can’t pull a U-Haul with a hearse.

And that making a career out of arousing hatred is no more acceptable for a pastor than for a dictator. (Talking about you, Pastor Warren, as you ride the backs of gays to a level of unprecedented national awareness that you barely needed, after having written the bestselling religious book, after the Bible, in human history.)

And that the national unity and resolve we must display to weather this storm is bigger than a red-state, blue-state issue. It doesn’t matter which side you’re on—if you’re on the Titanic, you’re going down.

Am I displaying my own prejudices? You bet. And my own optimism, too. I wish everybody shared these prejudices--and this sense of faith in our future, as individuals and as a society.

This could be the time that America moves from unbridled egotism to a sense of maturity and responsibility. And maybe we Americans will make the same move, too.
Because now more than ever, we’re all in the same boat.