In case you haven't been watching enough TV, our country, and therefore the world, is in the middle of a crisis right now. Now granted, it is a financial crisis so it doesn't actually involve real things, just numbers and expectations, but hey, let's not get too picky. Now that global warming is behind us, we can't expect every new scare to match up to the spector of cities falling into seas and cute-but-dying penguins.
So, as far as this crisis is concerned, I say we start treating it like one. And if you want to stop being part of the problem and start being part of the solution, I recommend you stop pussyfooting around and start taking some action, like I have. I can guarantee you when that crisis alarm sounded, I was the first concerned citizen to put on my hard hat and get busy... by heading out onto my roof to watch the sky fall. I've been out here for a few weeks now and haven't felt anything yet, but being out here has given me plenty of time to reflect a bit about what the crisis means to me.
Crises are great for a number of reasons, only one of which is that they're just a panic away from a depression. Being a product of the 80s/90s Big Blah, I have lived through neither, save the Halloween Blizzard of '91. So hearing all the buzz about the Crisis put me into the frame of mind I usually reserve for fire drills and commercial breaks during the Hills; I knew something annoying was about to happen, but at least it would be something else. I even got kind of worked up about the whole thing when my conspiracy-theory-sold friend started explaining"" to me how the crisis is really just pretense for the U.S. Treasury to make America the Fed's bitch (like it wasn't already, Nick) so it could go on and take care of all that one-world government stuff it's been wet-dreaming about since World War Two. Naturally, I liquidated all my assets (turned $57 into beer), started a freedom fire with my textbooks and prepared to defend my rental unit from the greed-stoked hordes of the capitalists who would soon be descending upon our quiet hamlet here. No one's putting a chip in my arm, I told the crooked cops that asked me to put out the fire and, please sir, come down from the roof.
I have to say though, as I write this from atop the tar, I'm a little disappointed so far. For all the ink in the papers and petitions from the pews, I expected to see a few more angry mobs or something. I've been flying my Hoover flags for weeks now, and all I ever get is ""Hey dumbass, your pockets are inside out!"" Where are all the bread lines? How come my dad still has a job? After all the squabble about nationalizing toxic assets and the menace of mark-to-market accounting, it's kind of a letdown when business continues as usual. The shops are still open on State, football is still on all weekend; if I didn't have to go through Yahoo! News to get to my e-mail, I'd probably think the only crisis we had was the fact that now it's too cold to lay out on Bascom, so in a few weeks I'm going to be white again and no one's gonna want to get busy with me. (Just kidding, I have Gmail.)
Granted, I do live inside a bubble called Dane County that protects me from reality, and I suppose it is a tad too early to cry ""dud!"" to this bottle-rocket of a crisis we have going here, so maybe we spectators should wait a bit before giving the ""Boring!"" chant a try. But I think before we all go off the deep end with the ""Green Scare"" filling the Wall Street Journal and 24-hour cable news stations, we should hearken to the insightful words of the O'Jays, from the seminal smash hit and theme song to the Apprentice ""For the Love of Money"":
""I know that money is the root of all evil / Talkin' bout, talkin' bout - Cash Money / Do funny things to some people / Give me a nickel, brother can you spare a dime / Money can drive some people out of their minds / Oh, that mean, mean, mean, mean, mean green!""
Money may make the world go round (or was it love? anyway...) but it sure as hell ain't ever gonna end it.
Do you still have access to the internet during these trying times? E-mail David at dhottinger@wisc.edu.
