My Business is Your Business

This post might be more suited for Swing State, but since the venerable (and much more knowledgeable) Matt has taken over, I figure I'll leave the podium to him. But I have to tell you, I'm just a wee bit freaked out by what's going on in this country right now.

As many of you know, I'm freaked out easily, and by a lot of things-- bees, for one. Really freaked out by bees. And clowns. And the continued success of TV's Two and a Half Men. The price of gas-- Ashley in particular may remember one memorable phone conversation in which I completely melted down when gas hit $2 a gallon after Katrina ("What will we do? How will we get anywhere? We'll have to buy horses! Fucking horses!"). The threat of nuclear war-- thanks, 3rd grade gifted teacher who thought nine-year-olds could handle a viewing of The Day After!

Right now, for instance, I'm coming out of a fear-session based on the impending end of the world, thanks to my brush with the Mayans on my honeymoon last year, and heading into a full-blown panic over the possibility of an impending depression.

Let me just say this right now, for the record-- I don't fully understand what's going on with all this buying-out and subsidizing the government is doing. And I don't recommend that you try to explain it to me-- Ben has already done so, and I kind of glazed over and started thinking about what sorts of fabrics I had around the house that I could fashion into smocks if we were to go bankrupt. All I know is, I feel like we're about two steps away from being forced onto the dusty road with our collective retarded brothers, sleeping in barns and accidentally killing baby bunnies as we search desperately for food and work.

I guess I was just not mentally prepared for this as a kid-- I was led to believe that one day, I could ride around my house on a miniature train, like Ricky Shroeder in Silver Spoons. Which would be awesome, but is looking less and less feasible as I groan over my latest 401k statement. (Perhaps there's some sort of miniature transport train system fund I should be looking into). Now, instead of light-hearted comedies about rich children, TV keeps bombarding me with these scary commercials about how everyone should really, really buy a house-- please, please, PLEASE buy a house, the commercial says, or Realtors will have to start eating each other, and soon we'll all live in mud huts like the Slestaks from The Time Machine.

My biggest worry-- alert, by the way, because this is where I get dorkily patriotic-- is that America is declining at such a rapid rate that soon we won't be... well, what we once were. And I'm afraid we won't even notice it, because we'll be too busy watching the premiere of Dancing With the Stars.

Because I kind of feel like as a country, we just don't really care anymore-- I mean, we care about Heidi and Spencer, which is all fine and good if you like caring about attractive people who are famous for no reason. But I don't know, doesn't it seem like we should be doing something? I don't know what, because I'm not exactly the most visionary when it comes to change-- keep in mind that I wore my hair in a scary, poofed-out style for 21 years just because I was too lazy to figure out how to use gel in my hair. But something?