winter of our discontent

The weather is tough and gloomy. There is also some sadness with some illnesses in some people we know. Today I saw a woman I went to grade school with. It made me think about the decisions and luck people had. She had a scholarship to Carnegie Mellon but didn't take it. I thought she was nuts; she, in retrospect, thought she was right. Life has a lot of twists and turns; maintaining an even keel is a lot to achieve. I think this country is in for some hard times and I think the world will not be sad. Certainly it will be several years before the economy stabilizes but it may be decades before the real problems are solved. It is likely that we will do a lot of stupid experiments before coming to the eventual conclusion. These markets have been more than down; they have been untrustworthy. The people and the planning involved have been revealed to be foolish, grasping, arrogant, and self-centered with no responsibility to each other or to us. And they have been beyond regulation; each step the government has taken has been outstripped by imagination or technology. The "oversight" has been--and likely always will be--behind.
In a way it might well be cleansing, it might make us all rethink how and what we want to achieve. I see us as a debtor nation, like some stupid South American country, with limited expectations. What this really means, if true, is that we are in decline. Each of us must have a care. We must not allow ourselves to be ground down. We must protect what we can, grow where we can and make those decisions compatible with our expectations and our happiness. We will not get any help from our enemies or our competitors. And, as has been amply shown, our leaders are out for themselves. And life is rich, even if we may not be.