Wow, its CRAZY out there, the sky really IS falling! An over 500 point drop on Wall Street on Monday (nothing like it since 9/11) and now, with only a small recovery yesterday, another big hit today of minus 450! Everyone is panicking and scrambling. We read, after Bear Stearns collapsed, there would be more to follow, but Bush and McCain stuck to policy - "Our economy is fundamentally strong!" The experts felt otherwise and in these past weeks we've seen the giants collapse - Fanny May, Freddie Mack (Govt bought out), Lehman Bros, the sale of Merrill Lynch, the bail out of AIG...then there's UBS, and Morgan Stanley considering a merger with Wachovia, and Goldman Sacks taking big hits, and experts predicting over a 1000 more banks will fail yet...leaving all of us wondering if we should be pulling all our money out of our banks right now (!) and hide it in a hole in the ground! Nothing appears safe, "guaranteed" investments seem empty words.

I WANT to be optomistic, I still am hanging onto thoughts of bright shiny days ahead. But reality is staring us in the face. And then to top this off we have to decide who to trust for our next President??? McCain has shown us how well he can lie. We believed Bush in 2000, but fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. We didn't vote Bush in 04 but he stole the election nonetheless. Obama they say is the new kid on the block with no experience. Well I'm betting on "NO" experience as opposed to the kind of "experience" we've been dealing with for 8 years now. It's good JUDGEMENT I'm looking for. I'm incredulous that McCain's poll numbers have been rising at a time when the economy is collapsing, when he's admitted to knowing nothing about the economy, yet it "appears" so many americans are willing to trust this man to turn this economy around when he spent the last decade helping get us into this mess. I suspect despite all his pounding of fists on the podium and promises of reforming Washington, America will get it right on election day.

This week I've overheard conversations in the lines at the local grocery store of this dusty little California town, some are convinced its the "end of times", yep, nothing like religion and dogma to make one feel better!

The sun, the moon and the stars would have disappeared long ago... had they happened to be within the reach of predatory human hands. ~Havelock Ellis, The Dance of Life, 1923