"...unable to comprehend, to really grasp, what is about to happen to this country and to the world." Why? Everything still looks so normal!

From Gerry Phelps

Trying to Grasp the Coming Disaster

(Image from mises.org)

There is a strange reason I have not posted for a month. I have simply been unable to comprehend, to really grasp, what is about to happen to this country and to the world. It has not been from lack of trying. I spend my days reading, researching, probing into what is coming and why. But it scarcely seems real.

Why? Everything still looks so normal! I look out over the city and nothing seems to have changed. Yet I know it is coming, and already partly here. It has been something like being on a coast and awaiting a tsuname wave that is coming within an hour. It might not seem real, because everything would look so normal while we wait. We would look around at the streets and houses, and try to comprehend that what we were looking at would shortly be replaced by smashed houses floating in swirling water. We might even know that afterward, it would be hard to imagine the "normal" that we had been seeing before the disaster. But before it fully arrived, it would not seem real. Just as now there is a comprehension gap, even though so much of the future is becoming clear. I suspect many are struggling, as I am, to really believe all that is happening. It keeps coming, faster and faster.

(Image from Drexel.edu)

Not that it's the end of the world. But it is the end of an era, the end of living as we have, and likely the end of the U.S. as we have known it. For all the world, a Great Depression. Most countries will suffer more than we will. In the U.S., add inflation to the mix of falling incomes and unemployment. With our national debt finally coming due, the government will no longer be able to borrow its way out of trouble. Retirement, medical care, all government programs are at risk. And there is more, much more.

Then there is the swelling effect on world security. The Pax Americana is being challenged, and if we continue cutting the military - now at the lowest percentage of national income in 60 years - and standing back from every provocation, there soon will be more wars in the world. Our own security is also under new challenges.

As things develop, I will try to do better at posting regularly. Grasping the seriousness and shape of our new landscape will be all too unavoidable soon enough. No time left for feelings of unreality.

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