Getting Blue Is Not Enough

I’ve felt emotionally depressed on more than one occasion in my life and it turned out to be good for me because I reevaluated my life and reordered it according to what is important to me. In fact, each time I’ve been depressed it’s because I allow myself to lose focus, to become concerned with things that are not so important, and to forget who I am.

America has done just that. Celebrities, money, pride, laziness, apathy; they all stem from our loss of identity. America is in the middle of an existential crisis and unless we regroup we could lose ourselves for good. I’m not an alarmist, but go back to my life metaphor… if I continually work too much and neglect my family (who is really the only important thing in this world) then I stand to lose them. My wife will leave me if I neglect her and/or the children long enough or severely enough. If America does the same, other countries will be more appealing and become a magnet for the peoples of the world.

Lest I sound too glossy, I know this country has made grievous mistakes; name one that hasn’t. A country is a complex organism involving individuals, factions, power-grabs and even the struggle to accurately record the events of its development. So of course there will be mistakes. On the whole, however, this is one of the greatest countries in the world. Or was.

Well, maybe we’re not to the point of using past tense, but it’s not that far off it seems. Not to worry, I have a solution: A National Economic Depression. I don’t mean we get a little “blue” and have a downturn or excessive inflation for a while, I mean we get an economic depression that provokes a reawakening in this country to who we are. I mean that we are hungry, cold, hot, tired, scared, and driven to work toward a common hope again. I think we’ve not only lost the ability to work toward hope, but we’ve lost hope. It’s not that we are so down that we’ve lost hope, it’s that we are so fat, dumb, and happy that we’ve lost it. We don’t need hope, we have stuff. Stuff divides people but hope unties. If we knew how to live with our stuff and balance our lives that wouldn’t be a problem, but unfortunately we don’t. As if that weren’t enough, hope has been replaced by greed and pride which have disconnected us from the rest of the world. How can we understand global problems when we are so detached from them? A depression, that’s how.