And I feel fine...

It swings back and forth. They command from their heights and it's us, the masses, the "little people" who get the good squeezing every 20-30 years or so. A generation spends their way out of pain. Then for the next, the limits come flying off and the spending dries up. Each one reaches for utopia with the words "never again" on their lips. Each tactic is chased through history by ever grislier monsters of our own creation. The government gets off our backs and tears the scab off with it. How many years of this next contraction do we put up with? The marketplace is a harsh disciplinarian. Not sure I deserve this spanking at the hands of some economic theorist with bad hair.

And now? This week? The paddles are out, trying to shock this thing we call an economy back to life. Bailouts, paper, credit, nothing works. It wiggles and twists, up one hour and down the next as if in jovial laughter at our efforts. Perhaps, finally, after centuries of abuse, the economy as we know it, money as ever we have loved it, is dead.

We'll be asked to redefine our lives and lifestyle. Not just to get through 3 or 4 possible years of "this sucks" but to retool what we think & do for whatever new thing is in the agony of being born. Will I have some sense f nimbleness about me to make the reinvention that my parents, faced with a squeeze at much my same age, failed to make? I feel like one of those mice I hated so much that I moved into this bigger, fancier, more expensive apartment to get away from. I scurry toward supply and hope to avoid the traps. I must have been made for more than this.

Maybe Ghandi was right and we really simply need smaller economies to better value where our goods come from. Maybe then...hm.

It's enough to just make me want to shop.