Who cares if gas is $4.00...$6.00... or $26.00 a gallon?

One of the problems of aging humanity is our inability to change our thinking with the times. We do well the first 30 or so years, sometimes 40, then on rare occasions we may find an individual past 50 who is in tune with the world as it evolves into a state of madness and mayhem threatening the sanity of those locked into their assigned time cubicle and unable to live harmoniously with the world as it is.
We find ourselves out of time and tune with modern morals, religion, political goings on, and of course financial matters. We are unwillingly pushed along to a world that is inconsiderate to virtually all the things we oldtimers imagine a perfect or at least acceptable world to be.
Job longevity, relationships, parenting, investments, retirement, health care, aging, death and life itself is all subject to change and will, like it or not.
As an aging baby boomer we are relegated to being the same grouchy, narrowminded, tiresome and out of touch whiners we use to make fun of and tolerate when we were young and they were old. Now they are us.
So, maybe we just need to think about things in a different way and do real comparisons, like this gas situation. If we take gasoline at $3.89.9 and eliminate the ones digit, we have $.38.9 which is the 1968 figure for a gallon of gas. Do the same thing with wages and all of a sudden you realize that with the absence of that pesky ones digit, you're living forty years in the past.
That makes it easier to deal with and a lot easier to understand. Now we understand we're as well off as we were 40 years ago. Hmmmm............... Wait a minute..... there IS something very different ......... IT'S THE TAXES YOU IDIOT!!!!!!!!!!!!!! In 1969 your entire percentage of withholding from your paycheck was about 16% not to mention sales taxes that were a fraction of the percentage paid now. All told, present day, your annual tax load from your wages sometimes reaches 40% plus for some individuals, and your taxes have just started.
Lots of credible think tanks and thinkers suggest your 'real tax load' is actually in the middle 80% range, from the ground up as a total of your gross income. Hang on for the inflation that you can't imagine either..... it's coming

A Nation at Sleep

Sleep is a definitive term for living but unable to have reasonable awareness of events around you.
As a nation we've slept as events and policy's have shaped a world that is self destructive in nature and has no directive quality in anybodys' or anythings' favor. It is a surreal situation to this writer in as much as I have memory of a very different time that would suggest that the simple values and math from that time would dictate that the world we have created cannot continue, yet we show no signs of awareness that we must either change or suffer the fate that all great governments and civilizations before us fell prey to.
The events that put us into our predicament are easily defined.
A nation weary from 35 years that saw us engaged in two world wars and then in the early fifties the Korean conflict was eager to lay back and live a different kind of life that was fresh and peaceful with technology that was exciting and even miraculous produced a generation that found ourselves in bountiful supply of assets that were seemingly inexhaustable and we were happy to take advantage of everything that liberal thinking could suggest.
We introduced ourselves to a welfare state that no society in history had even imagined, then gave welfare different names to make us feel better, and even respectable. As the entitlements grew we convinced ourselves that we had it coming or that it was the right thing to do, or in some cases, the only thing to do. The payoff for that is a large segment of population that either underproduces or doesn't produce at all and is an albatross to those who still choose to work.
We protected ourselves with health insurance plans sponsored by the workplace and the government provides health insurance for those who do not want to work, and the payoff for that is an endless supply of 'specialists' and very little health care and a bloated health industry that is insensitive to those who really need its' services, and complaints from virtually everyone who makes an income from the health industry that they don't make enough money and work too hard, all the while having little understanding or compassion for those flipping hamburgers or just struggling to survive.
We protected ourselves with endless and continuing legislation that has crippled the American entrepenuer and stifled the spirit of those who hunger to be independant in a controlled environment.
We protected ourselves against those who might do us harm to the point one must surmise the 'enemy', whomever that is, we aren't too sure of their identity, has perservered and we are no longer a free people and live with fear as a constant companion. The enemy, real or imagined, must be smiling.
We protected individual rights to the point that in 50 years we murdered untold millions of unborn through abortion and prevented the natural births of indefinable numbers through wholesale contraception. The payoff for that is a society that doesn't have the labor force from within to support itself, but begrudges the alien who comes to do the jobs that none of us will do.
We are quick to judge those who do not bow to us, but are happy to pay third rate thieves in the Middle East our future as a nation, as we sit on reserves large enough to meet our energy needs for generations, hamstrung by those in power who have no idea the struggle the working class is enduring by their blindness.
We must also take responsibility for allowing this to happen to us. While we have too long clung to political parties who lost their identity and direction and not active in an informed way in the voting booth, we also loved the cheapness of goods from other countries who systematically took over the shelves in our stores and closed the factories in our towns, we promoted it by declaring our love and respect for foreign automobiles telling ourselves the Jap cars would 'run forever' and standing in line to buy them and their clones while our own automobile factories have sunk to closure across the nation. We are quick to take comfort that foreign car manufacturers are building plants across America and hiring us back to work in them, albeit for a third of what Detroit paid its workers.
Possibly there may be a brighter outlook for us but it can only follow a collapse that we are unwilling to face or deal with, but will suffer whether we want to or not. Such is the world of Dumb Asses......................