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December 09, 2008
An Improbable End to a Dismal Year
With each passing day, as the chaos grows while a progressively frightened world waits uneasily for Christmas, New Year’s Eve, and January 20th, one is forced to wonder what could possibly happen next. The rapidity with which “melt-down” and “bail-out” have become familiar economic terms; to say nothing of the growing body count of once-powerful corporate entities, suggests that nothing can be taken for granted and also reminds us that the Great Depression, ushered in by a stock market crash in October 1929, was a global phenomenon that took over two years to develop and wasn’t finally over until World War Two was ended by the first-ever use of nuclear weapons in August 1945.There may be several messages lurking among today’s chaotic events; perhaps the most urgent, albeit least likely to be implemented right away, is the need to come up with an entirely new economic model to replace the one our species has been evolving for thousands of years and even predates the writing systems with which we have been recording our history since sometime after the last Ice Age.
In fact, long before that; as we now know with considerable confidence from Archeology, our ancestors were trading with, stealing from, and making war on each other long before they could write.
Doctor Tom
Posted by tjeffo at December 9, 2008 03:22 PM