The Sewers of Provincial Towns

Most of what you are being prodded to perceive as important and catastrophic has nothing to do with you.  The Dow, the US credit rating, even the made-up aggregate national unemployment statistics?  All fundamentally concerns of an ownership class to which you do not belong.  Now it is true that cataclysm does rumble across the globe from time to time; one would not have wanted to be caught up in the Eastern Front or rolled over by the Golden Horde, but much of what we perceive in historical retrospect as sudden and apocalyptic change was not so sudden and not so apocalyptic, and while the ruling powers may have rearranged themselves, the individual lifetimes of the ruled went on, within those lifetimes, much as before.  Perhaps people were a little richer or poorer than they imagined they might be; households grew to accommodate more mutual support or shrunk when smaller units could be self-sufficient; taxes and impositions were more or less onerous; the forces of law and order were better or worse; but still, mostly, the animals went to pasture, the soil was tilled, the lunchbox packed, the shop opened, etc.  What minor investment you believe yourself to have in the outcome of all this, your retirement plan, say, your little nest egg, is just a mind-control device; its purpose is to inculcate a false identity; but you never actually owned it; I mean, just watch its "value" rise and decline unmoored from any rational, predictable, comprehensible process.  It's just an arbitrary grant that can be given or taken away at any time.  It doesn't belong to you.  To look at "the economic climate" today and consider any of it a catastrophe is to self-delude in the most preposterous manner; it's to become consumed with minor and utterly meaningless gradations of mostly phony wealth.  We may all become a bit poorer.  SO WHAT?