Month: August 2012

  • cynicism and astronauts: death and rebirth of the dreamers

    My friend Rob recently wrote on Facebook:

    I was seven when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. We were camping with family friends on a plot of land on the shore of Lake George, site of our future summer camp. Dad had car batteries, an inverter, and a small black and white TV. Reception was horrible. We had never watched TV at the lake before – this was something special. In the midst of the VietNam war, which I was largely isolated from, we had a man walking on the moon. It was late, I was tired, but I watched intently. America could do anything. Looking back at the last 43 years, it is very hard not to feel that we have fallen extremely short of our potential. I miss that dream. [emphasis added]

    Indeed, how and why has America fallen so far?

    Think about rock stars. Most of them rise up to fame for a short period, then they loose it… they fade slowly back into oblivion. When they’re on tour (if they are), they always replay the great hits, because that’s what the crowd wants.

    There are exceptions.  Those are the bands and players that keep going for a decade or more, folks like The Beatles, The Grateful Dead, Pink Floyd.

    The reasons for America’s fall are hidden in the distinction between these two.  Before the “big reveal,” let’s consider another case: that of the science professor.

    The science professor works her ass off through graduate school and a postdoc position (kind of like a Medical residency) just to get offered a starting faculty position.  Then she works even harder for 5-7 years to earn tenure.  Tenure just means that her colleagues approve of her, and permanently accept her into the fold.  Once tenured, it’s very hard to fire her.

    The period of working towards tenure is often the most intensive of a scientist’s life.  I know, because I did that.

    When I was done, I lost the dream.

    I wandered aimlessly through a land of mental cynicism and angst for several years after tenure.

    The challenge was gone.  The dream was over. I’d reached the pinnacle. All that I could see in front of me was more of the same, but without the challenge, without the goal, without the prize to reach for.

    How did I regain the dream and recover from the cynical post-tenure blues? Therein lies the secret of how America could, if its people wanted to, recover from the slump.

    The problem with achievement

    There’s one big problem with achievement of any kind – whether it’s putting a man on the moon, writing a hit song, or getting tenure.

    Those achievements can breed a festering fear.  It’s a fear that comes from a few sources:

    • Fear of having lost the dream.  Once the dream has been achieved, it’s no longer a dream.  Seems obvious, right?!  Yet for the person experiencing this firsthand, it’s almost never obvious what the problem is.  There’s just a gnawing inner sense of “now what?” We’re not taught as a society how to deal with the “now what?” Think about all the popular stories and movies (e.g. Star Wars): they always center around a challenge, a dream, or a problem, and at the end of the story, the problem is resolved or the dream is achieved.  But those stories never show what happens next… unless a new challenge arises in the sequel.
    • Fear of loosing the status. A related fear is that of loosing the status achieved in pursuing the dream.  When I got my first big science grant with a score that put me in the top few percentile, I thought to myself: there’s no way I can repeat that! It’s impossible!  I had a fear that I couldn’t top my own success. I was gun-shy. That fear slowed me down.  I didn’t want to submit another grant and be knocked from my pedestal.  It reminds me of a TED talk by author Elizabeth Gilbert, who discussed the angst that comes with having written a bestselling book, centered around the question: “can I do it again?”
    Because of these fears, achieving something great after a first-time achievement is often just as difficult (if not more so) than the first time was.
    These fears lead to cynicism.  They lead to skepticism. They can even lead to mental poverty.
    Which pretty much describes the state of America today.
    We’ve been suffering from both of the above-named fears, as part of a sort of collective, zombified sleepwalking state after our successes of the early to mid 20th century.
    And so we can find a way out, in the same way that great bands and musicians, and great writers repeat their success over and over again.  We can find a way out in the same way that I found a joie de vivre again after the post-tenure angst.
    Actually, there are two ways, but I believe one way is far inferior to the other.
    The first way is that we lie dormant in our sleepwalking, zombified state until a new problem or challenge comes our way, which forces us to get sufficiently inspired and motivated that we get off our asses and creatively rise to the challenge.  The recent economic challenges have done this for some people, but not enough to really make a difference.
    The problem with this approach is that it leaves us waiting for the right challenge to come along, and for that challenge to happen to inspire the right feelings of motivation and even anger such that we get un-zombified and into action.  Those kinds of challenges can be pretty random, and personally I think it’s foolish to leave one’s future to randomness.
    The second way is to take charge and to create a new dream for ourselves.
    Kennedy pushed the dream of a Man on the Moon. When he pushed it, we had no idea how we’d accomplish that feat – yet we did.
    What happened after we achieved it? We didn’t replace the dream with something even more inspiring. That’s why we are so stuck. That’s why we are so cynical. Stuck just like I was in my life, until I built a new dream for myself after getting tenure.
    Recently I was at a conference with some high-powered scientists. A debate erupted over science funding, and one of the scientists pointed at the moon walk as a “boondoggle,” whose money should have instead been spent on “important” science like cancer research.
    I responded by showing the population graph of the world, which happens to be an exponential curve (if you know what that means, you know that it’s a wee bit scary).  We have no shortage of people.  But we do have a shortage of inspiring dreams.
    Having lost my father to cancer, I’d like to see that particular problem solved.  However, when we solve it, what are we going to do with all those extra people living longer lives?  Especially if many of them are just as aimless and dream-less as most of the population is?
    I quipped that, indeed, we needed to send a few more people into space (and there would be no shortage of willing volunteers for a Mars mission)!
    The “cancer research” vs “moon landing” debate is revealing. It speaks of an attitude that says, “dreams are unimportant, only facts and figures are important.”  One can look at the number of cancer deaths, and argue readily that “cancer should be cured!” without ever contemplating the biggure picture, or the “then what?!”
    With facts and figures, one can argue that we should spend more on cancer research than space exploration, without ever asking ourselves the key question: does cancer research inspire the next generation of scientists in the same way as curing cancer? (the answer is: no, it does not)
    Ultimately, science is supposed to be fun. Life is supposed to be fun. We’ve lost that understanding somewhere in a sea of “grim statistics” which lead to skewed priorities and lost dreams.
    So here’s the way to recapture the dream: forget about the statistics. Stop being so damn “rational*” and left-brained.  Start dreaming again.  Think big again.  Enjoy life again, and inspire others to think big, too.
    The only way to do this is from the bottom up. That means you, and that means I.
    One at a time, we can each start being dreamers again.
    And one at a time, we can help America regain the dream again.
    Morgan
    * About “rational” thinking: it’s almost never as rational as it seems. There are always underlying beliefs that “rational thought” is based upon, and those underlying beliefs are not often rational in their own right. Even if you try to get to the bottom of those beliefs through rational analysis, you must refer to deeper beliefs. There is no bottom to this: instead, you’ll find yourself in an infinite loop of drilling deeper into beliefs, one beneath the other. Here’s the left-brained version of that: Logician Kurt Gödel showed us that, in fact, there is no self-complete logical system that is “provable.”  Look up Gödel’s theorems if you want an enthralling left-brained read about the nature of “logic.”
  • What are you changing into? (and why this explains the horrible economy)

    The title of the post alludes to an old cliché, “the only constant is change”.  Today I had a strong reminder of the importance of this saying – especially in these challenging times.

    It’s a Sunday. Rarely do I check my email first thing in the morning, because it’s counterproductive to getting real work done (i.e. real work being the important creative work like book writing – checking email is almost never real work).

    It’s bad.

    Because it was Sunday, I let my defenses down a bit, and I had a peek at what was going on in email-land.  I noticed an email from one of the newsletters I subscribe to.  I rarely read this one anymore, but today something caught my eye, so I succumbed to a dire-sounding headline.  This newsletter is put out by Chris Martenson, whose goal in his work is to warn people of the impending economic and social collapse.

    I read a few articles, such as this one about the dying middle class. I got a bit depressed.  That’s why I don’t read these things much anymore.

    It’s worse.

    Right after that, I did a Google search on “house prices.”  I was curious about what’s happening nationally to home values, because I just made an offer on a house.  After reading the article on Martenson’s site, I was a bit paranoid, and wanted to reassure myself.

    I wasn’t reassured.  The search turned up another site that was all about the post-housing-bubble situation, where families and the middle class are being squeezed out, and rich investors are the ones buying all the houses. Following the article, there were a slew of posts by middle class folks who are stuck in situations not of their choosing – such as living long-term in an apartment, or being stuck underwater in a mortgage.

    The banks are to blame.

    Most of the folks there were blaming the bankers for their predicament.  Those greedy bankers (and Wall st types) are ruining the middle class; they’re ruining the ability of the average person to own a detached home.

    The politicians are to blame.

    The folks who weren’t blaming the “greedy bankers” were blaming the “stupid/inept/greedy” politicians, who are running our economy into the ground just so that they can get reelected.

    Everyone was blaming someone or something, yet nobody placed the blame where it really lies.

    What’s really to blame: an expectation of “stability”

     For a while after World War II, there was a suburban housing boom in the USA.  This boom gave us the promise that we could own detached homes with two car garages, in order to live the American Dream.  This went on from about 1950 until 2008 (though signs that it was headed towards problems were appearing in the late 90’s).  For fifty years, most Americans could count on being part of this particular “American dream” – and now, many Americans are being left out of it.

    50 years is but a mere blip in history.  On the scale of human development, it’s nothing.

    Just because something is a certain way for 50 years doesn’t mean that it’s going to stay that way for the next 50.  In fact, it very rarely does.

    Yet in all of the dire warnings by people like Martenson about the economy and the future, and from those who track the housing crisis, there seems to be an underlying belief that change must be painful and bad.  The belief seems to be that it will lead to instability and chaos.

    This runs deeply.  It’s not just these pundits – it’s nearly everyone that seems to think that stability and insulation from change should be the order of the day.  Maybe we’ve been fed too many movies where the hero lives “happily ever after,” so have come to expect that in real life.

    Real life doesn’t ever meet our expectation of stability

    Think about owning a car.  If you don’t fill it with gas, change it’s oil, and clean it regularly, then soon it’s going to be a worthless piece of junk (no matter how nice it is to start with).

    This is true of any object we “own.”  If you get a house, and then you don’t maintain it for 10 years, it’s going to get run down and dilapidated quickly.  If you don’t mow the lawn, it’ll be only a few weeks before the city is going to be giving you fines for your weed lot.

    There is no truly stable situation in life.  Stability is an illusion!

    Physics tells us why

    There’s a classical physics problem called the “three body problem.”  In this problem, we try to use Newton’s laws to predict three heavenly bodies that are interacting in orbits around one another.  It turns out that predicting their behavior far into the future is not only difficult, it is practically impossible.  The tiniest variation on the part of one of the bodies leads to major variations in the orbit patterns later on.  No computer is powerful enough to predict the effects of these tiny variations very far into the future.  And that’s for only three planets.

    While there are patterns of orbits that appear to be somewhat stable, they always still acting chaotically and unpredictably.  They may stay within certain semi-orderly patterns for a while (this is a so-called strange attractor for the physics geeks), but at seemingly random and unpredictable times they can shift the pattern.

    In the three body problem, there are only two states: somewhat unpredictable, and completely unpredictable.  There is no constancy, and there is no stability.

    Our social and economic systems are a 7-billion-body-problem

    If physics can’t even predict the behavior of 3 planets in orbit, and if there is no constancy in this system, then what does that tell us about a vastly more complex system involving 7 billion living, breathing humans? (Or, if we want to confine ourselves, we can look at just the 300+ million in the US).

    It tells us two things:

    1) predicting what will happen is impossibly futile.  It would take a universe-sized computer to predict what’s going to happen even in the next 10 minutes, much less what will happen a year or ten years from now.

    2) that stability doesn’t exist at any time or anywhere within this system.  Everything is always changing.

    This is truly a universal law

    It’s kind of weird that nobody else has labelled it as such, but that gives us the opportunity to do it.  We’ll simply call it “the Law of Change.” This law says that everything is always changing.  It tells us that any expectations to the contrary are in defiance of a deep, universal law, and are bound to be dashed upon the rocks of history.

    If we consider the housing situation from a “numbers” perspective, it follows this law well.  There has been no time in the past 50 years in which the housing situation has been stable.  It’s been either growing or shrinking.  The suburbs were either growing or dying.  Neighborhoods were coming up, or going down.  There is no constant.

    The same is true of our money system.  In the Nixon era, a nice car cost less than $10,000.  Today, a nice car is over $30,000.  The “value” of our money is always changing, due to a lot of factors in our complex system (such as monetary policy, but not only due to that).

    The Law of Change says that constant expectations are the real problem

    There are a lot of people who are down and out in our current economy.  Most of those people don’t understand the law of change, and they blame the politicians and bankers for the changes that have rendered their lives much different (and seemingly less satisfactory) than they used to be.

    The real problem is not the bankers or the politicians.  The real problem is a failure to acknowledge the changes always happening around us, and to creatively work to keep ahead of (or at least up with) those changes.

    Clinging to the old American dream is clinging to a past that no longer exists.  That dream said: get a steady job, get a loan, get a nice house, get an RV, and you will be happy ever after.  We could debate about whether that dream ever did lead to any true happiness, but that’s for another blog post.

    Here what we need to see is that, while there was a brief period in history where that equation worked for quite a few people, that equation no longer works.

    No amount of finger pointing, blaming, or even more extreme action such as rioting and wars, or anything else, is going to bring it back.  The world has moved on, as it always does, never to turn back.

    Some people are nonplussed by change (and in fact, profiting from it)

    In the forums from that housing site I was reading, many commenters were pointing blame at those evil investors who are buying up houses, making them unavailable to plain American families who might otherwise occupy the homes.  Those evil investors rent out the homes, preventing those families from owning the homes.

    This misses the reality quite stunningly.  The reality is this:

    1) Because many of these families are still clinging to the old American Dream, looking for a stable good-paying job and an affordable mortgage – yet not achieving it (because it no longer exists) – many cannot afford a home – even in today’s down market.  If they can’t afford the homes, then who’s going to buy them?  The alternative to the investors buying up homes is to have a glut of homes on the market, further depressing values and causing even more foreclosures, short sales, and the like.

    2) Those investors are the people who understand the Law of Change – at least to some extent.  They are people who see where things are headed, and have come up with a way to ride the wave of change in the housing market.  Many of them are making out quite handsomely as a result.

    This doesn’t excuse malfeasance.  It doesn’t excuse corrupt bankers or the like.  But what it does do is say this: any time change occurs (which is always) there are those who sit around resisting it, and there are those who embrace it.

    Those who sit around resisting it and complaining about it are those whose fortunes sink.

    Those who embrace the change are those whose fortunes rise.

    Change and the rise of Hitler

    If we think about one of the most dire economic situations of the 20’th century, the Hyperinflation in the Weimar Republic that led to the rise of Hitler – there were many people suffering and resisting change.  But there were also people profiting, who rode the tide of extreme currency change that was happening.

    Which of these two groups more enabled the rise of Hitler? The change resistors, or the change adopters?

    If we look at what people who resist change do, they blame the “negative” changes they see on other groups.

    If we look at what people who embrace change do, they don’t usually sit around and point fingers, they usually are too busy creatively keeping up with the changes to sit around and to point fingers of blame.

    While the reality of the Weimar was certainly more complex than this, we can know quite likely which group it was that spent more time blaming the bad state of the Weimar on the Jews: the change resistors.

    If more people had said, “ok, look, this currency business sucks, let’s figure out an alternative” and they had focused on building that alternative, there wouldn’t have been as much time to sit around pointing fingers at the Jews.

    To be clear, the rise of Hitler was due to more than just the change resistance.  But the change resistance did play a part.

    Resisting change is the problem, not the solution

    Chris Martenson (and many others who have a similar message) says that we can’t rely on the old ways anymore.  He’s right. We can’t, and we never could.  The only difference between now and twenty years ago is a matter of degree.  Right now, the challenges we face are forcing more people to face this universal truth head on.  The longer people resist, the more the struggle and difficulty (and perhaps war/etc) that occurs as people are forced to deal with the changes that have been resisted for decades.

    At any time in our lives, we can choose to either resist or embrace change.  

    Resisting change is often the more comfortable and less scary route – but far less satisfying.  It tells us that we are nothing but hapless pawns who can’t help our circumstances.  We shift all the responsibility to outsiders, and so if bad things happen, we aren’t to blame (except that, by our own resistance, we are ultimately to blame for what happens to us). There’s no fear about doing the wrong thing, because we don’t have any responsibility.

    Embracing change is the more scary but also far more rewarding route.  When we embrace change, we can find ways to stay on the leading edge; to grow with the times where growth is happening.  But when we embrace change, we are forced more directly to take responsibility – if we make a decision to try something new, and it fails, it is much more difficult to blame someone else.

    There’s not any actual difference in where the blame lies for our failures; in reality, we are always and the only people to blame, ever, for our failures. But in the change-resistance mode, it is much easier to deny responsibility for failure, and pretend to pin the blame on someone else.

    Change and the rise of  YOU

    It’s a shame that our standard educational system doesn’t prepare us for what’s going on. Our educational system teaches nothing about being entrepreneurial or creative.  It only prepares us for a standard job and a standard life – the one that no longer exists for an increasing number of people, as the world continues to change.

    As with alcoholism and drug addiction, the first step to a cure is always to admit there’s a problem.

    The problem we need to admit here is that maybe we’re a bit too addicted to the idea of stability, or to an unchanging and unchanged “American Dream.”

    If we can truly admit this problem, it then opens us up to begin looking for creative solutions to the problem.

    The creative solutions abound, and I’ll talk about them in other places. But we can’t even start on the creative solutions until we’ve said, “yes, I have a problem.”

    Once you’ve moved down this path, you’ll realize that the number of possibilities is nearly endless.

    Once we stop clinging to a narrow dream (that was defined by movie script writers and politicians), we open up a wide realm of new and more satisfying ways that we could be living.  We open up ourselves to the fun and the challenge of moving towards new goals and new ways of being, rather than the boredom and fear of trying to maintain the status quo.

    Once you open up to, and embrace the change, you open up the door to your imagination.  You have the possibility to then re-imagine your life in whatever configuration you’d like it to be, and you get to move towards that.

    Doing that is way more fun that clinging to a sinking ship, and pointing fingers at all the bad people who caused it to run into the iceberg.

    That’s why I no longer regularly read stuff like Chris Martenson’s blog or the Oil Drum.  That’s the game they’re involved in.  Instead, I’ve become involved in a very different game: how can I take advantage of change, to increase life satisfaction and well-being.  I’ve found out it’s more than possible.

    Do you need an antidote to all the gloom and doom out there, without a bunch of touchy-feely mumbo jumbo?

    I will show you how to tune out all the dire predictions and negative thinking.

    I will show you how to “reimagine” your career and life, making you more valuable to your employer or customers and increasing your life satisfaction.

    I will show you how to stay ahead of the changes that are happening, so that you can be a person that benefits from them rather than suffers from them.

    Check out the free new videos I’ve made for you, including “You can take this job and shove it!” and “$215,517 per hour.”

  • re-imagining the American Dream

    Today I ran into yet another person who’s dissatisfied with where she’s at in life.

    The disillusioned seem to make up about 80% or more of the people that I meet or have the opportunity to talk deeply with.

    Some dissatisfaction can be a good thing… it motivates us to want and achieve more. That’s not the kind of dissatisfaction I’m referring to, however. I’m talking about a deep, core dissatisfaction, that goes something like this:

    “What the fuck am I doing with my life?”

    This seems to be much more people now than ever who are asking this.. Why? Why now?

    The stale American Dream

    Dreams and goals are great when you’re moving towards them. We had an American Dream that our parents and grandparents worked towards.  Prosperity. Abundance. Freedom. Then, in large measure, they got that.  While there are plenty of people who’ve been left out of this, there are also plenty of people who already achieved it… and are bored with it.

    To understand this, imagine going for a gold medal in the Olympics. You work and you train for many years, then you get the gold.  Maybe you even do it a second or third time.  Imagine if it stopped there. Imagine if, after doing that, you had no new goals or challenges.  Instead, you just sat around, looking at your gold medal(s) and reminiscing about how great that was… constantly. Pretty quickly you’d become a bore. Pretty quickly, you’d probably take up a drinking, drugs, or gambling habit to “escape” the tedium.

    Dreams aren’t so fun anymore once you achieve them.  It’s great to revel in accomplishments, for a while… but then it’s always time to move onto the next dream or goal.

    We had an American Dream.  We accomplished it.  Then we sat around reveling in it for way too long.  It’s grown stale, and holds no excitement anymore.

    The suburbs are stale

    The suburbs are a shining example of the dream that became stale.  Before we had them, most people either lived in cramped city quarters, or in a rural agrarian setting.  The suburbs promised a perfect “happy medium” for masses of people.  Everyone got plenty of space, the two car garage, the pool, and the RV.  You could zip to work in your shiny new auto on wide-open freeways.

    From the standpoint of someone living in the city who wanted more space, or someone who lived in the country who wanted more social and economic contact, the suburbs were a fantastic dream to be a part of building.

    We plowed tremendous resources into building them. We built up a TV and movie culture about life in the suburbs (the Brady Bunch comes to mind!).

    That lasted for a good 30 to 40 years, from the 1950’s to the 1990’s.  But then the dream got stale.

    The suburbs were mostly built out. They were a “done deal.” We knew that we could accomplish it. There was no challenge left, no thrill, no excitement. What’s more, the younger generations wanted more.  They wanted new challenges and new horizons.

    It’s not that the suburbs suddenly became bad.  They just didn’t hold any hope, promise, or challenge for the future.  The dream had moved on.

    The dream and the economy

    That left the economy in a mess.  At the bottom of it all, the economy depends on human needs and desires. Sure, it is possible to prop it up for a time with governmental intervention – but that never lasts.  The core is always the populace, and how they translate their needs and wants into economic activity like buying and selling.

    It was clear that the old way of doing things was stagnating.  The masses didn’t need ever bigger houses and more cars.  The internet started to promise a “new way,” and a bit of a bubble got built up around that.

    Yet once that first bubble collapsed, the government and banks went into a panic.  They decided that it was essential to prop up the dream all over again… so that we could get back to the “good old times”.

    They lowered interest rates and promoted cheap and easy loans. People started buying houses, not because they really needed or wanted them, but because they were driven by greed.

    It ended in a big ka-pow in 2008.

    Then, we were back to where we started.

    Let’s prop up a dead dream (again)!

    A certain fiction theme goes like this: someone dies. The protagonist stands to loose a lot if people know that the person has died. So the protagonist pretends that the dead person is still alive. That is, until people catch on.

    That’s exactly what the big players in our economy have attempted to do.  They like to pretend that the dream isn’t dead.  “No, in fact, it’s quite alive.  Can’t you see all this money we’re putting into small businesses, new housing starts, and making shiny new cars?!”

    However, the populace ain’t buying it.  A lot of us smell a rat.  We know there’s something wrong, we just don’t know what.

    And that’s what leads to this widespread, core dissatisfaction.  We want more, but we’re being told that we shouldn’t want more.  We’re told that “living the American Dream” should be all we need.

    That’s bullshit.

    Humans have always wanted more, and it’s a good thing

    The whole reason that humans left the plains of Africa to travel across the world was because we wanted more.  The reason men stepped foot on the moon was because we wanted more.  The reason we have the internet is because we wanted more.

    Wanting more is our heritage. I’m not just talking about more stuff (in fact, as far as stuff is concerned, less is often more). I’m talking about more out of life. More and better experiences. More satisfaction. More meaning. More challenge. More inspiration. More joy.

    Unfortunately, because powers that be have propped up the old dream (you know, the one where you get a job-for-life and are happy-ever-after in the suburbs with the white picket fence), growing numbers of people are angst-ridden, depressed, and worse. They want to move on… but don’t see how they can.

    “I’ve got kids to feed and bills to pay.” 

    Instead of defining a new dream, most people stay stuck. They feel obligated to the old dream, even though it’s not of their making.  They feel beholden to something that previous generations created, and they have no new dream to replace it with.

    If you want to know why the economy hasn’t gotten better, this is why.  Until we collectively realize that we need to move on and define a new and bigger and better dream, we’ll stay in a chronic sort of economic malaise. (either that, or we get embroiled in a war that captures people’s imagination and passion… but I think sending people into deep space would be far more interesting than just having another war).

    We don’t have to destroy what came before. A lot of what came before is good.  Having a good living space, having freedom to travel around, and having enough food on the table… all those are great. We don’t have to give those up, and we shouldn’t give those up.

    Instead, we should build on them. We should reconfigure them to our current liking.

    Once we’ve done that, we should figure out: what’s the next challenge? What’s the new dream? Women on Mars? Exploring the deep seas? Deciphering the genome? Finding more joy and contentment? All of the above? We should pursue those dreams with courage and passion, just like our forebears did in building the original American Dream. Just like earlier humans did in setting out to explore the planet.

    The day of reckoning

    Someday soon, masses of people in Western countries are going to wake up and realize that the dream is dead (maybe that’s what the Mayan prophecy of 2012 was all about?)  It’s inevitable.

    Then the only question is whether they’ll realize what the trouble is, finding a positive way of engaging with a new dream…. or instead, finding a scapegoat to blame their woe upon, and starting down a path of destruction.  We’ve been down the latter road at least once, and it wasn’t pretty.

    I do hope that instead, we’ll find the will to re-imagine the American Dream into something newer and better, something more appropriate for our time, and something that we can all aspire to.