I should have figured I was on to something back in the spring of 2004. Prof. Hettler popped us a quiz in Macro, and me, being completely unprepared did nothing but write "Laissez-faire" in giant capital letters across the five question exam. He gave me a 2 out of 5, which wasn't bad. At least I showed some effort.
Turns out my foresight was top notch. Here we are in the most dire financial situation in generations and Laissez-faire is a main point of contention. The infamous label of American greed finally hit its peak. Normal Americans stretched their limits to live in the nicest neighborhoods. Corporate executives welcomed this hubris with open arms. Henry Paulson's face is beginning to have the look of one of those rotted jack-o-laterns you see sitting on a porch two weeks after all the candy has been passed out.
My peers and I are educated. We are intelligent, fairly successful for our age, nice looking and most of all, really fucking pissed. Too bad if we wanted to enjoy our twenties, and don't even talk about buying a house. Like that's going to happen.
Right now I'm watching last night's Daily Show and there's Bill Clinton doing his Bill Clinton thing and making me fully confident he could rescue us from this abyss in like ten minutes. But seriously, what is going to happen? George W says $700 billion of tax payer money will do the trick. Yea, that'll be good.
My education on the crisis is rather broad, I understand the premise and what happened to cause this shit show, but where do we go from here? Hell, this thing is so messed up I actually just enjoyed watching Jon Stewart. I even laughed a few times.
The shameful thing about it, is that I have absolutely zero faith in anybody charged to fix this. Who is going to help?
I have no idea. This is about the time where Americans unite. After an emotionally charged primary season followed by an even more emotionally charged election campaign, the two sides have agreed to come together and try to solve the equation. Unfortunately, Americans uniting generally has one main ally. Someone to lead them. Who will lead us now? A Wall Street executive who spent billions getting us into this mess? I hope not.
My gut hates when I'm cynical. Cynical citizens are some of my least favorite. There's no benefit to cynicism and some always leads to more. The past few years have flown by. My support for our troops is endless, I even gave a benefit of doubt to the war in Iraq, however misguided it might be (maybe it isn't, who knows...that's not my point).
A fear of mine is that America has finally reached the precipice that's been predicted for years. There's never been a doubt in my mind that we wouldn't be saved. But it could be different this time.
In the meantime, I'm gonna try to get that quiz re-graded.
