Worth a look

I found this article today and it gave me a moment of pause.

Victor Hansen writes:
We are in a weird age.

Do the smart thing, we were told, and invest in a 401(k) retirement account. Buy into the American dream and own your own home. But lately it seems that those who put their money in low-earning passbook savings accounts or rented rather than buying may have been better off.

How true this is. What does it mean to be an American anymore?

In our Orwellian world, borrowing to spend what we don’t have has been renamed “stimulus.” Those who pay no federal income taxes — almost half of Americans — can somehow be promised an income tax “cut.” In the new borrowing of trillions of dollars here and trillions there, billions of dollars now sounds like pocket change.

And yet the bank wont loan me money that I can't pay back?

When Americans turn to their political parties for answers, they are even more confused. Populist Democrats such as Sen. Chris Dodd and Pres. Barack Obama took more AIG campaign cash than did pro-business Republicans.

Wait....They took what? Sounds like a bribe to me.

Yet conservative Republicans during the Bush administration ran up the debt and increased federal spending far more than did liberals under Bill Clinton. A Republican president has not balanced a budget since Dwight Eisenhower did it over a half-century ago.

Where are all the good answers?

When our president references the 19th and 20th centuries, he apologizes for American sins but stays silent about the United States’s defeat of the Nazis, fascists, Japanese militarists, and Soviet Communists. The world hears contrition about Americans dropping the bomb to end World War II but never remorse from those responsible for Darfur, Grozny, or Tibet.

What happened to focus on the good, not the bad?

Here comes the hook:

There have been a few crazy years like 2009 in American history — 1860, 1929, 1941, and 1968. And given what followed all of them, it might be wise to prepare for even crazier times for us ahead.

Read the whole thing, it is contemplative, stirring and moving at the same time.

h/t to Stormbringer