Ya Think?

ANGER IN AMERICA: As unemployment hits 9.1 percent, Americans are losing their cool. A Newsweek/Daily Beast poll finds rising anger levels affecting everything from work to sex drive. Gas and grocery prices are soaring, the housing market is crashing to new lows, and yet another dismal jobs report has confirmed a stubbornly high unemployment rate, The Daily Beast’s Douglas Schoen reports. Three-quarters of respondents think the country is on the wrong track. A majority say the anxiety wrought by this recession has caused relationship problems and sleep deficiency. Two-thirds even report being angry at God.

What happened to the hope and change? I guess this is it.

Although it's tempting to try and blame Obama on this...these economic problems stem from much broader issues. And the voters are culpable of buying into the hope and change bullshit because we are wishful thinkers. There aren't easy answers to this stuff and Americans should be mad...at the political class for lying to us (or telling us what we want to hear), at the connected robbing the country blind, at the world for constantly patronizing and taking advantage of us while lambasting us behind closed doors for our "arrogance," ie power. And lastly at ourselves, for being suckered into various delusions about our own wealth and power and not demanding better. Because at the end of the day, we are still a democracy and a country who belongs to its citizens. The tea party is the first political movement to grasp this, but I fear they don't understand the depth of the issue any more than the connected political classes. Will we figure it out? I think so. But it's going to take 10-20 years, not 6 months...and it isn't going to be a top down solution with another stimulus, or another foreign adventure, or a major tax cut or a huge expenditure on entitlements like healthcare, or voting in a new president, etc. I believe it will come as a result of a lot of small things...from everyday Americans exploring business opportunities and creating new ideas - whether it be business or technology or books - it will come from small people making sensible political reforms such as redistricting or lessoning major interest groups power in politics, it will come in dividends from things like killing Bin Laden and crippling those who would do us harm, it will come by making the tax code much simpler and everyone paying something, it will come when movie studios stop making gimmicky 3D movies and start trying to get back to the basics and tell good stories, it will come when someone figures out how to make healthcare a more efficient and easy product for Americans to use and buy, it will come as a result of people in their industries and their lives making the small things around them better and more sensible and more affordable. And it will also come when we are harder on the bullshiters and the charletons and the crooks...and bring back some shame into the people who do the small things poorly.