No News is Good News...But

As I posited on Friday, last week was bad, but the weekend was even worse. To the downgrade of our nation's credit rating, we had to add the much more impactful human story of the tragic loss of 30 members of the US military in an attack on their helicopter in Afghanistan. They perished alongside Afghan military troops as well. It was the deadliest attack on US troops in the 10-year long war.

And now the downgrades continue with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac joining the untoward fold. Add to that the fact that the Dow is down nearly 500 points as I post this and the Nasdaq and the S&P 500 are both down very sharply.

I was in conversation yesterday with a septagenarian who feared that the usual cycle of "good times" followed by "lean times" was permanently stuck at "lean". He asked my opinion, and I told him that unlike those other recent decades in our history, this was not a generational, every twenty years-type of cycle, but a century-type of event: not a phase but an era. The difference to me is that while all the cyclical causalities are in place, they are at present joined by the vast and desperate need to re-invent ourselves as a people and an economy.

Think Industrial Revolution: Everything had to be re-imagined in order for the economy to reshape itself for the times, for the coming Twentieth Century. Inventors came at us like little children clamoring for our attention, and we gave it. Now we need the inventors and investors to pay attention again. We have to lay the groundwork for the next revolution...The Green Wave, for lack of a more appropriate moniker. We have to meld our society into one that not only accepts change but demands it. And cannot stop at the need to remake our thoughts and feelings about jobs and industry, but also about people as our demographics change now as powerfully as they did during the immigration heydey of the early 20th Century. We did pretty well with our immigrant population then, and we can do so again, if we only commit to doing so.

And slumping in the shadow of all this rhetoric, a philosophy of commerce if you will, is a muted heartbreak half a world away. For in the past three months 29,000 children under the age of 5 have perished in Somalia. That's nearly 10,000 little kids every month. I can't even get my mind around such a figure. That's like the entire population of my town dying every month, for three months in a row. That is if the population of my town was made up of small brown starving children.

Yet somehow amid all this horrific news I remain hopeful. I suppose I think of all the things we as a nation and we as a species have come up with in the way of answers to the toughest of questions. We rose from the Dark Ages, we defeated the Nazis, we continue to work to eradicate AIDS, we make beautiful music, art, and books.

Maybe it's because I have kids and I hear daily the inventiveness of their minds and the character of their hearts. And while at the moment we don't have a whole lot to offer them in the way of financial security, perhaps they are a generation who will rise to the fore anyway. Maybe they'll let us "put it on account" while they engage in the quiet work of learning the skills and developing the theories that will, in the coming years of the 21st Century, perhaps just save us all.