Free Soup; or, in the Good Old Days, everyone was broke, and it was OK

this seems largely to be a time of verging. everything seems to be poised on the edge of one thing or another. last night the Red Sox squoze under the door of the ALCS, thankfully buying us another week or so of perfect entertainment. and, we are going to need it. the news comming out of manhattan, and now most of europe, is dire indeed. those of us, myself included, who have been thinking for years that our course of action has run far to closeley paralel to that of the Roman empire, are wringing our hands in near panic, because we learned this before in a high school history class. the overextended military, the crumbling infrastructure, the rampant political and economical recklessness, it all adds up to what the romans themselves called hubris, and historicaly speaking, it always preceeds a fall. This has been repeated in more recent times by the british, and then the soviets, and now, apparently, our own empire has begun to slide. Once it starts you cant stop it; the only hope is to ride it out and learn from it.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. True, we are all going to have to tighten our belts and get used to the way our grandparents lived. But how many of you have ever heard your grandparents claim that times are better now than they were then?

The most recent cover of Time magazine summed up nicely, if (probably) unintentionally, what I’m trying to get at here. The cover is a photograph from the Depression of the 1930s, a picture of a line of men outside of a soup kitchen. The headline is “The New Hard Times”, and it is a picture I’ve been waiting for them to run for about 3 weeks now (at least they have stopped the damned Obama-McCain-Palin bobblehead theme that ghey got stuck on last month sometime). Anyway, take a look at the picture when you get a chance. The men are lined up next to a building with a large window. On that window is a sign that reads “FREE SOUP”. Take a minute to think about that.

After 9/11, everyone was talking about how strong the country was, how together everyone felt, etc. I was cynical and thought that it would all change pretty quick, and I was right, although looking back, I feel that things may have been different if bush hadn’t begun to sodomize the COTUS right away. But try for a moment to remember that feeling, that idea that no matter what happened, everything would be OK because we were all Americans now and forever, and we were going to stick together and get through it. The Free Soup sign reminds me of those days, those brief couple of weeks when it almost seemed like the attacks had had a bright side, in that they had caused such unprecedented (at least in our collective amnesia) solidarity.

So if we go crashing into financial ruin (and it seems that we will, my friends), if our standard of living gets set back about 80 years, if times are tough, if luxury grows scarce, we will grow stronger as a people, even as our empire weakens to the point of irrelevance. We will start to see things in our character as Americans that will remind us of what it used to mean to be an American, of what is good about this country; not it’s might, not it’s hegemony, but the ability of it’s People to pull together and surmount any obstacle, to get the most out of “hard times”, and to come out the other side wiser, stronger, and better for it. Remember, money isnt’ everything. It isn’t even close. We stand to loose vast sums of it in the coming months, and perhaps we deserve to, and perhaps we need to.

BTW, I am having a hell of a time quitting smoking.