"As GM goes, goes the country," a phrase not even whispered around Wall Street these days but shouted out constantly in the heydays of leveraged buyouts and unrestricted Hedge funds.
"California is the cutting edge of the rest of the country." It's been very true that California has been a trend setter, but no one will cop to that now that California is broke. That doesn't mean that it's still not true, however, and that the rest of the country will soon follow suit.
"Newspapers will always be around, people love their morning newspaper!" Nope, not anymore - it's AOL or Google news now. Who has time to read more than a headline and the first and last paragraph? And the cost of paper, printing, and then delivering newspapers, compared to cyber space, well, it is laughable. All the advertisers have moved on.
Yep, we are all headed for bankruptcy. The housing market is not going to come back, and neither are jobs. That is all over with. We're done, and as we move toward 2012, it will worsen. The government will soon be unable to issue any more credit, and that will kill us because it is only credit that has kept us alive. We can't make it on our own.
Dividends are paid, not on profit but on expansion and growth. No growth, no dividends, no stock market - it's simple. Without credit and investments, big business will dry up and only mom and pop stores, built from savings and not credit, will be the only survivors on the streets, no different from other third world countries.
This will be a time of great anguish, and a time of great revelation. The anguish will be felt when we lose virtually everything and are forced into a poverty stricken lifestyle.
The revelation will come when we realize how captive we have been to the capitalistic idea of wealth accumulation, with our entire focus on material gain. This has been to the detriment of any meaningful spiritual life, with our spiritual lives becoming nothing more than shells of ritualistic social parties to further our networking and wealth potential.
In other words, we will be forced, kicking and screaming, into a more peaceful, relaxed and loving lifestyle. How else could we ever get there?
We will also be forced into socialized medicine, because no one will be able to afford paying CEOs big bonuses any more. Doctors, health care providers, hospitals, medical equipment suppliers, pharmaceutical companies will all either pay what the government dictates and give up their Mercedes Benz, or simply go broke like the rest of us.
When everyone is strapped, socialism naturally evolves because we have to help each other out. We can't sit isolated in our million dollar suburban pads and watch the poor suffer on our big screens and say tsk, tsk anymore. Because our home will be vacant, and the bank that owns it will be abandoned as well, as will all of our savings accounts and CDs. The FDIC, unfortunately, is already broke!
So, there will be big changes, and if you can get through them without losing your mind and going off the deep end, things in your life will get better. I mean the real things that matter, like true friendship, sacrifice, patience, humility, giving the shirt off your back, maybe your only shirt, to someone who needs it more than you.
On the other side of this mountain of debt and delusion that we have saddled ourselves with lies freedom, real freedom, not the freedom of wealth but the freedom of our spirit, and that's what matters most.
anagarika eddie is a meditation teacher at the Dhammabucha Rocksprings Meditation Retreat Sanctuary (www.dhammarocksprings.org), and author of A Year to Enlightenment. His 30 years of meditation experience has taken him across four continents including two stopovers in Thailand where he practiced in the remote northeast forests as an ordained Thervada Buddhist monk.
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