Time

It's really hard for me to wrap my head around the fact that 2004 was ten years ago.

I'm still playing with my Game Boy Advance SP.

I remember when the Game Boy Advance was this new amazing thing.  I remember thinking about waiting for the price to go down.

Do you ever look at ads for 90s gaming consoles in the $300-$500 range? It freaks you out sometimes.

As the future quickly becomes the past, as the things you are planning becomes the things you are remembering, I think it shows how silly it is to wait for the future.

I remember being in fourth grade and wondering about the state quarters. California was supposed to come in 2005. I wondered what the world would be like in 2005. That was pre-9/11.

I also want to think about all the false predictions that have come and gone, and how people have wasted their entire lives waiting for some pseudo-supernatural premonition.

Y2K.
2012.
Fiscal Cliff.
Sequestration.
Anything else government related that the media makes a giant hulabaloo out of.
The failed predictions of terrorist attacks that would lead us into war with Iran.

I have realized at this point in my life that if anything truly bad happens with the economy, the people in power will have to hurry up and fix it, or someone's head is going on the guillotine. I don't think the idea that people will blindly go into the FEMA camps will come true.

It's hard enough to make people evacuate an area knowing full well a hurricane is going to destroy their land. If people will openly defy mother nature, I don't think they will listen to the government.

In the history of world, displacements of poverty similar to that of France before their revolution and Weimar Republic Germany have always been the catalysts of larger military conflicts.

While the new displacement of people following the recession has led to people embracing alternative political ideas, as seen by both the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street, this factions lack clear goals which disables them from enacting reform.

And yet, all this comes down to, is Chicken Little. The sky is falling. They've been telling us this since forever. Old books about how the Antichrist will rise in the U.N. while the Soviet Union invades us. It's that old Biblical fear.

And I think that old Biblical fear, I think that fear of the future is what holds people back.

Society does not live in the wilderness. We are not engaged in some hundred years war. There's food in the pantry, in the dumpster at the fast food joint if you're really that desperate.

I believe it was Sam Kinison who said "if you can't get your act together in America, where else are you supposed to get it together?". He also made the point that America would probably be the best place to be if you found yourself at the wrong end of an economic displacement.

I know telling people who think this is the end that the sky is not falling will not convince them, so I will say this instead.

Yes, the sky is falling. What have you done to prepare for it?

Do you grow your own food? Do you have your own emergency supplies? Do you tell those important people in your life that you care about them?

If you haven't done these things yet, don't you think it would be a larger priority than to scream in an argument with a friend that you have now made an enemy?

And to those people hiding out in the woods: Do you really wanna spend the rest of your lives that way?

Is there not something else you wish you had done?