Toldja So

So I've seen some reader comments in the WaPo (as we call the Washington Post around here) saying that your average Joe could have told you years ago that the whole economic system was too messed up to hold together. Your daddy may have been a blue-collar working stiff, but he worked at the same job his whole adult life, and retired with a solid pension and enough savings to give his kids a small inheritance. Nowadays, both Joe and his wife Jane work full time just to keep up with the payments on the credit card bills. If there's something left over, they put it into their 401(k) or their kids' college fund and hope the market doesn't take a nose dive when the time comes for them to draw on those funds. Joe and Jane could lose their jobs for any reason or no reason at all, and a hospital visit or a hike in their mortgage payments could send their household finances into a tailspin. If the whole global economy depends on overstretched American consumers like Joe and Jane and everyone they know, why are you surprised that the whole thing is falling apart now?

On the other hand, an editorial writer for another publication (whose name escapes me now) thinks this kind of thinking is just Democrat gloating over the mess those darned Republicans have made. He calls it the flip side of the Republican gloating during the heyday of Newt Gingrich, and those eight years of you-know-who that just ended last month.

This doesn't feel like gloating, though. In order to gloat, you have to be standing outside the mess looking in. Unfortunately, there's no ground to stand on right now that is outside this global mess. If you're going to indulge in schadenfreude, there has to be some freude. Otherwise, it's just schade, and we're all pretty much knee-deep in schade right now and sinking fast. No, this feels more like Jeremiah warning of dire things and getting thrown down a well for his efforts. Jeremiah was just as broken-hearted as everyone else when he turned out to be right.

We still have a few die-hards on both sides of the aisle in Congress and on the talk radio shows (and apparently one guy who is keeping my sister's print shop afloat by spending scads of money printing up anti-Obama stickers). They throw parties when they are up and throw tantrums when they are down. Most of the rest of us are rolling up our sleeves and picking up our mops and buckets. We were right, we saw this coming, you didn't listen, but we're all in this mess together, so we might as well start cleaning things up. Maybe you'll listen next time, but we rather doubt it.