*sigh*

That's just it, *sigh*. I've mostly been avoiding much news or commentary of most sorts. Because it just makes me sad and tired and makes me ask, "Dude, where's my country?" Because that's what I feel like.

You know the old ads for some kind of freeze-dried coffee stuff, how they claimed they were in some ritzy restaurant, and they had "secretly" replaced the real coffee with the instant stuff. And all the people in the ad were raving about how fantastic the coffee was. The upshot was, supposedly people couldn't tell the difference between freeze-dried and real coffee.

And I always suspected that there were a lot of folks - probably quickly hustled out the back door, and not shown in the ad - who went, "Wait, this coffee tastes like dishwater. What have you done to the coffee here?"

And that's how I feel about things now. That there are a lot of people smacking their lips over the new way government and society works, and the people who are going "Wait a minute...this isn't right" are getting the bum's rush. Or they're getting called crazy. Or told they should be drug-tested.

I don't know. I also feel like this whole mosque controversy is a smoke screen, a red herring, as the economy continues to hemorrhage jobs and more and more people are talking about having to try to live off the land or some such thing.

Does a landowner have the right to sell land to an Islamic group? Yes. Does a group that owns land have the right to build a mosque on it? Yes. Is it a kind, loving action, sensitive to other people, especially those who lost loved ones in the Sept. 11 attacks? Hell no. Is it very likely intended as a poke-in-the-eye, a dancing-on-the-graves-of-those-who-died? I kind of suspect for at least some involved, it is.

But: the government continues to spend frightening amounts of money, and the job situation gets no better. I care less about a mosque at Ground Zero than I care about the possibility that 10 or 15 years (or less) down the line, we will not have an economy in this country - that we'll have Zimbabwe-level inflation, or that we'll all become indentured servants of the government, just to pay for the bailouts now. People aren't hiring in part because they're afraid of what new taxes may be down the line. People (like me) aren't spending money because they're either fearing their jobs may go away, or because they suspect that higher taxes are coming, and they better save up money to pay the IRS man. Banks aren't lending. Everything's stuck and stopped and stagnant. And there's a definite sense of unease - even among friends of mine who voted for Obama. There's a sense of "why haven't things got better?" (Well, this is one of those cases of "If you mess with something too much when it's working suboptimally, it gets worse.")

The other thing that makes me pessimistic is the fear that there are individuals who will do everything in their power to discredit or destroy good people who might choose to run for office - to make them look crazy or stupid, to spread distorted or outright false information about them - and so either the people of goodwill give up in disgust, and only the scoundrels run, or, because of misinformation, good people won't be able to win.

I hate to say it, but I doubt we will ever have a truly "great" president again, at least not in my lifetime.

So again, I feel like closing off in my own little box. Doing what I can to teach students (at least until the "college is a monumental waste of money" meme spreads to the point that I'm out of a job), doing what research I can, tending my own garden. If it all goes TOO bad, I've decided - I have a strong back, I'm not afraid of work, I'll find someone with a small farm and sign on as a laborer - in return for food. (I think there are enough small-scale hobby type farmers, or small organic farmers, who need the manual labor). And yeah, it would probably suck a lot of the time, and I'd probably be hard-pressed to pay utility bills and the taxes on my house, but you know? It might suck less than still being part of the rat race.