"The Day That Great Liberty Sulks On Her Stand" or "The Towers Were Not The Only Thing That Fell"

How long was it before they started calling it The Great Depression?

When the people were standing on the edge of it, or when they were a few months or years into it, did they look around and think "We are about to enter the Great Depression?"

How long was it before they called it the 7 Years War? What about WWII? When disasters are on the horizon, rushing onto us like a hurricane onto a coast, how long until you give it a name, you know what it is, or know what it was?

What are they going to call this?

I have an overwhelming feeling that we, right now, at this exact moment, are on the edge of something big. There is a great shift happening right under us and around us and I wonder if they'll look back on this day or this year or these 8 years and ask themselves, "Did they see it coming? How could they not see it coming?"

We are on the verge of completely consuming our natural resources where we're talking in decades and not in centuries. We possess less than 5% of the global population and yet we use over 25% of every natural resource that our planet provides. The climate change is creating the most severe weather across the planet that we have seen, and the air in our lungs turn to smoke while Polar Bears die homeless. The foreclosure rates in our country climb as families end up on the streets, and more and more moms and dad walk home with their head in their hands without jobs that they planned to retire with. The largest mortgage financing and insurance companies are dropping off Wall Street's Marquees like dried bugs from spider's webs. The President of the United States is begging for help. We are borrowing 20% of every dollar we spend from other countries who are bigger and smarter than us and our national debt reached 9 Trillion this month. We have spent 7 years across the world fighting[losing] a war that was poorly planned, poorly executed, and poorly intended. Our losses have topped 3000 lives, and God only knows how many Iraqis we have killed. Iraqi children have mother and fathers just as our children here do, and do not mourn them one second less than you mourn ours.

What is happening to my country?

As I watched the Presidential Address late last night, all I could hear from President Bush was "Oh God. Oh God. Oh God. What have we done? What have I done? What are we going to do? "

We are failing. The country with streets made of gold, with the greatest opportunities for success and changing lives, with our beautiful green lady who stands on our coastline and welcomes all who have no where else to go, I can hear her turning her head and her lowering her torch and begging forgiveness from her huddled masses as she trudges through the dirty bay water where she will surely crumble.

All this time we've been afraid of 1984 or Farenheight 451. We have feared mind control, censorship, discrimination and thoughtcrime. But have we been afraid of the wrong sort of dystopias? I think it's time to realize that the real world problems are far worse than the worlds that Orwell and Bradbury imagined. At least the ThoughtPolice had jobs.

I can not shake the foreboding cloud that I feel is upon us. I thought that one day my children would ask "Mom, weren't you in college when the first black president was elected?"

But now..."Mom, how old were you during the Great Disaster of 2008?"

"Where were you when China bought Montana?"

"Mommy, when did you move to France from America?"

"A long time ago, sweetheart. When it was a very, very different place."

Avant il est mort....


--Genevieve