The Dow is still Down

Sitting on the heating pad while trying to get the back to settle down, I'm watching the smiling babes at CNN worry about the Dow. It's below 7000. I don't like to think about the Dow or the NASDAQ or any other acronyms that mean numerical trouble for us. I don't understand them, and have never been able to figure out exactly what the numbers and arrows mean. That's not a good thing to admit since they have a direct effect on what happens in my life and the lives of those I love. I do understand that down is bad and up is good. I guess, since I don't know anything about Wall Street and the suits that run everything, I'll have to put my faith in the people who do, or say they do. Certainly, the Prez is thinking about it, and that's his job. Mine is to keep working for my paycheck and trust that I can keep doing that until I win the lottery.

It always makes me think about the stories of the Great Depression that my dad would tell. His favorite (and mine) was about a boy he knew in his one room schoolhouse who was so poor that he would go to the creek with two pieces of bread and catch a grasshopper to put between the slices for lunch (yeech). Whether it was true or not it made his daughters squeal and that was certainly the effect he wanted by the telling of it.
He'd talk about how he was born in one room and chicks were hatching in another and that it was more important that the chicks survived than him.

From listening to his stories and those my grandmother told of the abuses of the Industrial Revolution, I must conclude that we have quite a ways to go before we get as desperate as those who lived through those times.

Who knows, perhaps if we did get desperate enough we could produce another generation like that one.