Happy Days Are Here Again!

“For the first time since March, the Dow Jones dipped below 11,000,” the Media headlines cried, even Fox News.  Let’s see now…how long ago was that?  We old Tea Partiers have to use our abacuses.  It’s mid-June.  May.  April.  March.  That’s what?  Three months? About 90 days.  Oh my God!  That’s like, ancient history!

The Dow Jones only broke over the 12,000 mark in February.  Then it promptly flopped down again, and the Media is telling us this is the “first time” since March.  Three months ago.

What this is the first time for in awhile is what the Dow Jones has looked like since the 1960s – like a patient in cardiac arrest.  Financial experts call it “the whipsaw” – wild fluctuations in market prices.  Steep sell-offs and huge climbs.  Between 1960 and 1975 there were approximately 9 major whipsaws.  Up and down, up and down, up and down. And all the while, the Democrats were building up their social programs.

Then came the Reagan years, and just like the post World-War II climb through the Forties and Fifties after a similar Whipsaw period during the Great Depression (of the 1930s, and the Dow Jones made steady gains, like a successful mountain climber.

If you look at the Dow Jones in the perspective of the 1930s, they had some serious drop-offs, appalling to investors of the day.  Fewer people, less money by today’s standards, but the economic crisis was devastating.  Soup kitchens, unemployment lines, abandoned kids.  The children of that day were determined not to see that happen to their children.

However, their spoiled children, brainwashed by a progressive education movement, and aided by an eager drug culture, entered their own adulthoods oblivious.  Now we have several generations of extremely naive, financially illiterate, drug-addled, green-mailed children who don’t know a whipsaw from a chainsaw and couldn’t care less.

Employed adults are only now waking up to the fact that their 401ks are bankrupt. I wanted to jump off this flaming jet hurtling earthwards towards financial catastrophe and put the brakes my losses by making my own decisions before it was too late, but I wasn’t allowed.  Collective “bargaining” – collective anything – you just can’t beat it.  Still, I had fewer losses than my co-workers because I saw where things were headed.  While they were discussing who America’s Greatest Loser was, I was watching the stock market just sort of drop, like a rock from the Empire State Building.

The first clue was our rising food prices.  Didn’t anybody notice?  No one noticed during the Clinton Era.  I noticed it right away – inflation, major inflation in just a few months’ time.  But the Media denied it.  ‘Oh no, there’s no inflation.’  My mother’s manual typewriter there wasn’t.

We’ve got to get back to the good old days when we could make decisions for ourselves.  This collective stuff is for the birds.  Well, it works for me in my condo.  But then our association is pretty lenient about flags and gardens and pets and so forth.  However, in a moment, they could decide not to be.  Or, the whole group could decide to make a mass exodus to some empty, cheaper condos out in Michigan, selling out to some developer who wants to turn the place into a nursing home.

Judging by the DJIA historical graph, we’re in the third round of a government take-over – that is, the government is taking over.  The hippies of the Sixties are today’s bureaucrats and unless we do something (if there’s anything we can do); we’re going to be on their soup-and-socialism lines.  The DJIA is not only an accurate record of our modern financial history but also the Culture War of the Sixties.

How could so many people have been so stupid?  My Depression Era parents warned us in the Sixties and we listened.  One of my neighbors is busy growing a hanging vegetable garden from his porch.  Any time I want to, I could put in a veggie garden; I have a southern exposure garden.  I may plant a few root vegetables, which are more nourishing when you’re starving, if the soil will take them.

Since another, worse Great Depression is impending, the sooner I get busy on my garden, the better.  Food we can get, though it may be difficult.  The Liberals have been slowly weaning us off meat so we’re used to not having it now (and we have the jellyfish spines to prove it).

What worries me is the book burning.  More and more people are becoming addicted to electronic media, which is wonderful.  But – all that information can disappear with the click of button.  I fear the Progressives will invite the Gullible Generation to mass book-burnings – or “recyclings” perhaps – so the Gullibles can get rid of all the weighty books and make more room for computers and HDTVs and whatever is coming down the road.

I’m being selective.  I don’t want to turn into the Book Lady with a cellar full of moldy books.  But I have an idea that I’ll be the local librarian when the time comes.  The librarians are all government employees.  No way are they going to stock “anti-government” books.  When the Gullibles finally grow up and realize their kids are learning the wrong things, I’ll have a lending library of “banned” books for them to borrow and learn from.

I’m convinced of it.  I know what I’m talking about because in the Sixties my elementary school didn’t have a library at all, until my father complained.  They finally installed one in the janitor’s closet then refused to allow my younger brother to take out a book.  My mother contacted all her old associates and loaded up the family car with 700 cast-off books (or 700 pounds of books).  She brought them to the school door and told the administrators never to any kid they couldn’t have a book again.

Oh, but things have changed?  Really?  On a photo assignment for my company, I covered a non-profit reading donation in the city.  All inner city kids, they were only allowed one book (okay – at least in the beginning).  Their teachers accompanied them.  Instead of letting them choose their hearts’ desires, the teachers would tell one kid a book was too long for them, or that it had too many words, or the words were too big.  Other kids wanted to take a book from the lower level selection for little brothers and sisters at home (this was after the one-book rule was waived).  Oh no, you’d be bored by that.  So I snuck the kids the books behind their backs.  

Yes, food and water are important.  But without our history and culture, we’ll be a lost people, a scattered collection of people fighting off the zombies you see in futuristic horror movies.

Or is the future already here?