Now is not the time to put your blinders on, and smile blissfully into the abyss.  I am not saying to walk around screaming "Bah Humbug" to every passerby.  I do realize that a person's thoughts, whether positive or negative, do have an effect on their environment. If you think negatively, your mind will automatically seek out confirmation that the world is a terrible place.

Anger provides adrenaline and momentum.  However, too often, I see people ignoring the truth, and deciding to put blind faith in that fact that "everything will turn out just fine."  It won't, and it hasn't.  The only thing that will change things is action...the reality is that those most deserving of a "bailout" are those that don't need one.

So many of us have interpreted the desire to be positive thinkers in a very narrow and ultimately ineffective way. The push to be positive often results in ignoring our true feelings. Instead of recognizing that we don't always feel positive and learning how to convert and turn round our feelings, it so often ends up with us denying them altogether.

Another reason why positive thinking doesn't work is that we often veil our negative feelings with a positive surface. So we say "I want a loving relationship". Sounds good right? Except that underneath there is the hidden message that having a loving relationship wouldn't even be an issue - unless you'd been in one or a series of not so loving relationships.

It's time to get realistic, get mad, and change things.  There are no readily available answers, and one is left feeling anger at the recklessness, greed, and incompetence that has been guiding our country for the last 8 years. Wall Street infiltrated our business because of greed, and now has left it crippled and uncertain. The fundamentals of Real Estate are, in the present, critically altered.  No amount of positive mental attitude can change that.

I think of Wall Street and Washington as I read Whitman's Democratic Vistas, amazingly enough published in 1871...not long after the Civil War, which was less about slavery, and more about a clash of economic interests and political and social class among whites.

I say we had best look our times and lands searchingly in the face, like a physician diagnosing some deep disease. Never was there, perhaps, more hollowness at heart than at present, and here in the United States. Genuine belief seems to have left us. The underlying principles of the States are not honestly believ'd in, (for all this hectic glow, and these melodramatic screamings,) nor is humanity itself believ'd in. What penetrating eye does not everywhere see through the mask? The spectacle is appaling. We live in an atmosphere of hypocrisy throughout. The men believe not in the women, nor the women in the men. A scornful superciliousness rules in literature. The aim of all the littérateurs is to find something to make fun of.

The depravity of the business classes of our country is not less than has been supposed, but infinitely greater. The official services of America, national, state, and municipal, in all their branches and departments, except the judiciary, are saturated in corruption, bribery, falsehood, mal-administration; and the judiciary is tainted. The great cities reek with respectable as much as non-respectable robbery and scoundrelism. In fashionable life, flippancy, tepid amours, weak infidelism, small aims, or no aims at all, only to kill time. In business, (this all-devouring modern word, business,) the one sole object is, by any means, pecuniary gain.

The best class we show, is but a mob of fashionably dress'd speculators and vulgarians. True, indeed, behind this fantastic farce, enacted on the visible stage of society, solid things and stupendous labors are to be discover'd, existing crudely and going on in the background, to advance and tell themselves in time. Yet the truths are none the less terrible. I say that our New World democracy, however great a success in uplifting the masses out of their sloughs, in materialistic development, products, and in a certain highly-deceptive superficial popular intellectuality, is, so far, an almost complete failure in its social aspects, and in really grand religious, moral, literary, and esthetic results.

I also think of Eisenhower's farewell address.....and the Guns versus Butter dilemma. We have become a paranoid nation, and as Eisenhower warned in the 50's, we will be in big trouble when our military spending outweighs our investment in society's greater good. That time has come.

All the best, and Merry Christmas,
Dave Eisley