We happen to be alive during the most prosperous (yes, that's right), care-free, illness-free, pain-free period of time in human history. 100 years ago many of us would be dead by now (raises hand), while those of us still living would have been riddled with pain, rotten teeth, and many of us would be addicted to opiates. Oh yeah, we would have lost half of our kids to stuff like polio and scarlet fever. You have a roof over your head, a fully belly and a variety of entertainment that our ancestors could not have imagined.
So cheer up and listen to Annie!
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15 comments:
Of course this only applies to those of us with enough time to spare and money to spend on high-speed Internet access so that we can read blogs like this one.
The good old days, they were really awful.
They WERE awful, but they were better than the prior century. And so on, back through history.
My daughter loves Annie and I am trying to live up to the promise of the song. Other than preparing, there's nothing else I can do. If I read "grim" or "unexpected decline" one more time in a news story I am gonna hurl. So I want to look on the bright side of things. Gonna try, anyway.
Paul writes,
How many great city states, with fine public buildings, wealthy youth, sports arenas, merchant ships in the harbor, farmers bringing in harvests, with fine arts have come and gone?
Forget the city states. How many empires, spanning thousands of miles, with fine Armies, well equipped, postal systems, large educated Mandarin class of bureaucrat rule enforcers have come and gone?
In some ways, American industry was forced to have supply chains, glued by digital finance, from Silicon Valley, to China, to New York paper, and Saudi Oil, maintained by German parts put in place by Korean laborers because we had to. And there was a little left over for profit.
What makes that system hold together when with out profit, and smooth interaction between the parties is fraying? Will the Saudis continue to buy their parts, or spend it on Islam? Will the Koreans stay in whack job Saudi Arabia? Hows that New York, Tokyo, Russian paper holding up? Will that plant in China that makes those control boards on those oil pumps be in business in a year?
Avian flu? Socialist medicine doing to American medicine what has been done to the schools?
It can and has happened, more times than I can factor.
If everyone would lay off the TV and radio and web gloom and doom for just a week the masses would be in a much better mood in short order.
Paul writes,
Ted Kennedy, Bwarny Fwank, Detroit city in ruins, Detroit Big Two on life support, bad expensive poor performing public schools. The Alaska highway built by black guys, in winter, during war in months, now road projects a few miles take years. Bush One and Two. The Evil Clinton's. Obama The Empty. Fat Dennis 'Coach' Hasteret. Trent 'Hairpiece' Lott. Pelosi The Burn Victim. Stinky Reid. McQueeq. The Secretary of The Treasury Tax Cheat Summer Camp chiseler. Your local DMV. Surly steroided nose picking cops. Eight people at McDonald's with four customers and still can not get it right. The Mini-Me Obama of the RNC, Steel, attacks Rush( how stupid is that?)
401k.
Upside down mortgage and taxed for sub-prime, plus Section 8, plus 'low income' ..
Troops wandering around Afghanistan for the next ten years like Alexander's lost army.
Yeah. Be happy.
It's been my experience that if you are trying to find reasons to be miserable you will find them in spades. But finding reasons to be happy is a little tougher.
Here's one: No matter how bad your situation, at least you're not Casey.
Many people are worse off than me, I'm afraid... I'm fully cared for by my coddling parents. I'll always have food, a bed, and a place to stay. Nearly all my time is leisure time. I robbed banks to the tune of a half-million dollars and no one seems to care.
Stories like mine are part of the reason people are so bitter. :-p
Back to napping! I've earned it!
To quote my Grandmother, 1910-1982, "Everyone talks about the good old days. I lived in those days, and they weren't that damn good". The poorest in America today live in conditions our forefathers would have envied, and are envied by many around the world. I've seen school kids in Africa studying under street lights because they had no electricity at home. I've known other Africans who walked 1500 miles to get a better job and support their families. Poverty is relative.
In much if not most of the world hardship means having your child die in your arms. Here it means having to borrow the newest Xbox.
Remember, our poor drive cars and have large televisions. In the rest of the world, the poor live in cardboard boxes, bathe when they can in rain water and hope for food everyday.
Count your blessings, America!
Spoken like someone who pulled completely out of the stock market at its height while everyone else's decades of saving have been reduced to 40% of their former value. It's easy to be cheerful now that you've doubled your real wealth just by watching everyone else's misfortune from the sidelines.
What America needs right now is a good old-fashioned bloodletting, just like that of the French Revolution.
WSJ article estimates risk of a depression @ 20%.
Look at how long it took last time for people to accept things were not going to get better anytime soon:
http://www.oftwominds.com/journal09/MB-depression3-09.html
As someone said, this is nothing that a decade and another world war can't cure.
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