With Barrack Obama (the only president whose last name you can not say in an airplane due to its second syllable) taking the oath the day after MLK Day, I am reminded of the call for change he made during his election crusade. Well! Now it begins!
The economy is in the dumps (or those of wealth and power are now starting to feel the effects the low and middle class have been feeling for years), those who have been gouging the public by unfairly raising prices on oil and utilities (using an inflated futures market) are trembling for fear of indictment, and conservative states changing their presidential party votes after 40+ years of staid complacency has now come to pass.
Change is good. But is the tide going to turn quickly, slowly or at all? I see it already has.
1. PLANE lands in RIVER and ALL are SAVED! When does that happen? After all the dour 9/11 horrifying images and stories, this happens? If you are not a person of faith, even you may have felt a tinge of the greater unknown having a hand in placing the right pilot, in the right place at the right time.
2. Arizona Cardinals get to Super Bowl? Say what? The Cardinals are the doormat of the NFL. A joke. Crown anyone king of the hill, but never the Cardinals! Yet here they are in a Championship game, their first since 1947.
3. Oil is at -$40 a barrel and we are still planning for alternative cars and energy. You put us back to sleep in the 80s and mid 90s with cheap oil, you screwed us with $4 a gallon last year... our tinged memory may linger a little longer on the oil industry and oil profits after we were paying 3x more for your precious commodity. You made us sell our SUVs, we looked cool in our SUVs, we never went into 4 wheel drive in our SUVs, it cost over $80 a fill up in our SUVs...we are done with you! Stop making SUVs because we don't need white elephants anymore!
4. New car companies can get GREEN light to start production! What? After all those years of strong arming the government to stop such a thing, the Big 3 Automakers have to acknowledge that it can finally happen. You don't come begging for a bail out and decide to still call all the shots. The bail out was to pay people's pension and healthcare (so you wouldn't rip off any more of it) and keep people employed as you scratch your head and try to guess which way the wind is blowing. Gas, hydrogen, electric?
What do you build? What will they buy? They aren't buying a full bailout when there are new ideas and car building companies out there ready to start up in the next few years.
5. No one is buying because of the credit crunch. The banks lobbyed to stop bankruptcies and go hard on defaulters... and all the time they were losing customers to mattresses. Prepare for a banking system overhaul!
6. We are finally realizing the truth... if you make $35,000 a year, you can NOT own a $300,000 house. Add a divorce, college for the kids, lost jobs, lost savings and investments... you can't afford a $35,000 house. The housing market plunged because someone said that a house should double in value every 10 years... ahem... it doesn't! It's a house! And your wages will not double in 10 years.. so now in this era of change... people are wiping the SLEEP out of their eyes!
It's not an era of doom and gloom. It's a brand new era! The era of reality. And is it going to be fun watching it set in!