We are in one of history's worst economic disasters ever. We got here because of the way things were - the bad rules and anything-goes mentality. It was satisfying in a lot of ways. There was plenty of money and lots of good stuff to get. And for quite a while, there were many, many more opportunities of success for the everyday person. For a while. But things kept quietly snowballing out of control. The short-term, get it now without any regard to the out-of-balance consequences attitude was rotting away our inner strengths.
The foundations that made America a place of dreams come true for the rest of the world to aspire to were slipping away - disappearing into that ever-widening philosophy of capitalism. The free-market concept kept acting like a spoiled child throwing temper tantrums to get what she wanted. But instead of seeing that her ever growing demands were just causing her to ask for more and more, and put a stop to it, we called it recession; snickered and foolishly chalked it off to growing pains. We refused to see that she had us twisted around her little finger and would soon demand more than we could give.
She was becoming a little monster and we just kept going on our merry ways. We kept telling ourselves that things were just temporary. They would work themselves out. If we just take care of our own best interests and leave everybody else to their own devices, we could hold on to those concepts of "choice" and "pulling yourself up by your bootstraps." We learned how to tighten our capacities for tolerance and compassion. Everybody was getting their own little worlds of "us" verses "them." It allowed us to continue ignoring what was getting slammed right in front of our faces - that now, even our friends and neighbors were being swallowed up by the abyss.
Things that couldn't possibly fail, were failing. Old and new alike were falling by the wayside. Everybody everywhere with everything they were doing was being squeezed.
And yet, instead of accepting our mistakes and learning from them -making our weak points strong ones - and instead of taking our outright faults and being humbled by them, we just keep trying to get back to where we were.
We keep thinking the old ways that did us in, can now somehow save us.
