The Watershed

Come gather ‘round people wherever you roam
As we prepare to bury the life we have known
And accept that from now there’ll be no going home
Your money’s no longer worth saving
The meat is all gone, we’re left nothing but bones
For the times, they are a changin’

Apologies to Bob Dylan, but my mind has been rewriting the words to his song all week, as I’ve watched the stock market pitch and plummet.

Like John McCain, I admit economics is not my strongest subject. Unlike Mr. McCain, I’m not asking this nation to entrust its economy to me for the next four years. I do know this: our fundamentals are not sound.

Four years ago, as George W. Bush began his second term of office, his big idea was to privatize Social Security. He wanted to take your retirement nest egg out of the hands of government bureaucrats and allow you to invest it with private investment houses – like Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch.

Fortunately for us all, Mr. Bush’s asinine idea died a quick death. Imagine if it had not – where would we be today? As it is, instead of privatizing the Social Security fund, we’ve nationalizing the insurance company AIG and now the money markets via taxpayer-funded bailouts.

It’s fitting, I suppose that George Bush is ushered out of office on yet another wave of colossal failure. His eight years in office will be remembered – I predict – as the watershed that turned America from the globe’s only superpower into a second rate debtor nation.

It began with Mr. Bush being installed in office by the right wing of the Supreme Court when it stopped the process of democracy in Florida in 2000. Next up were the disregarded warnings of terrorist attack on the homeland. Mr. Bush decided his August vacation was more important and thousands of Americans died.

Then he lied us into a war of choice, walked away from the Kyoto Treaty, ruined the economy with enormous trade and national deficits, opened the doors to cronyism, corruption and self-dealing. A major American city was washed away by a storm and Mr. Bush ignored it – it conflicted with another of his August vacations. But you know all this. Now the grand feast is complete and the bill and the indigestion arrive at the same moment. We get both as Mr. Bush slinks toward the door.

Come January, a new president and Congress will have to start sorting the messes – economic, foreign policy, energy, military and civil liberties. We do get to choose who those leaders will be, although the choice should be clear even to the densest voter at this point. Regardless, the life we have known is gone; I don’t think it will come back.

Ahead are the years of energy scarcity, when the significant effects of global warming begin to be felt by us all. If we can begin to take care of our citizens with national health care and better schools, we might be able to avoid the dreadful economic drubbing Mr. Bush and the Republicans have prepared for us. Doing so will take a wisdom that has rarely been seen in Congress in the past two decades.

If you’re over 40, you will at least be able to say you grew up in that place where the American dream once lived. Cheap energy, predictable weather, a standard of living that seemed to rise with each generation since the nation’s founding. I hope those of us over 40 can leave something to our children besides memories.

© Mark Floegel, 2008

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