=The Week=

This is the week that I predicted a few months ago.
I am at last hearing people mention the real ghosts of 1929 and the horrors of economic collapse and decline.
It is just three weeks until "we" Americans (actually the electoral college) choose our new President for 2009 and the beginning of the next decade of the century. This current first Decade of Chaos, many will be very happy to see gone, and I am certainly one of those also.

1999 began auspiciously with such excitement about the turn of the Millennium, and slight, although real, worries about the Y2K problems with computers that would possibly happen.The excitement and fireworks passed and much was calm. There was a certain golden feeling of accomplishment and contentment most everywhere.

Then came 2000 and 2001.
Hanging "chads" and Bush, the Gore messiness and Dale Earnhardt died (Charlotte had a Hero for a while).
Then September 11th. The date no longer gets a year after the simpler statement that is that.
9-11.
The Decade of Chaos had started.

I remember looking out my apartment door that I lived at that time,
"Now, they ALL will understand...."
I closed that door and was not seen for three weeks.
I was so visible and out to be seen during the heated and unfair presidential race of 1999-2000, 9-11 changed it all. Death was everywhere.
America changed after that and many Americans' collective mood was really never at the level of the happier fireworks and millennium days; all seemed so diminished by September 11th.

Now it is over seven years later and we have experienced the financial equivalent of 9-11.
Truly not in 79 years, since 1929, has this much crisis happened in the financial world.
Just like 9-11, this is a World crisis also and we have much more to get through for the final "sword of the play" to fall and the footlights go out.
I have one more time gone to my apartment door, looked out and said,
"Now, they ALL will understand...."
This time there is nothing else to comprehend, we are in a real social time of alteration.
Change.
This is a loaded word: change can be anywhere, the good as well as the bad. The different; how may of us would have ever thought we would see times like these?

In three weeks we will know our new President who will begin his work in January.
My solid prediction is a win by Barack Obama.

I wonder what George W. Bush will do for those last three months in Washington, while sitting in the Oval Office...

I really expect he may become quite the very private and erratic party animal.

A mild version of a 21st Century Caligula, as the Decade of Chaos turns over to the next uncertain ten years.