Meeting The Challenge

"Nature does not do bailouts!" I was reading a recent article by Al Gore (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122584367114799137.html) where I came across that line. It is so true, and it is what has been bothering me about this whole damned fiasco since the beginning of the discussions. It is the drug mentality all over again! We live in a society that has come to expect a quick fix for any ailment that besets us. More Valium, Prozac and Xanax are prescribed and used in America than all other over the counter and prescribed drugs totaled. We have an industry built on surgical procedures to alter obesity. We want instant gratification, instant solutions, and, yes, bailouts.

Sorry, that isn't how it works! Development and maturity are the result of meeting challenges and adapting our childish need for "having it our way" into some other way that lives in harmony with the world. It is critically important for us to learn to live life on life's terms, not ours, and that seems to be where the train derailed some years ago. Part of the science that started engineering our planet in an effort to provide for improvements and cures grew into a larger-than-life Frankensteinian monster that now stomps about out of our control. We (collectively) learned that we don't have to suffer and that generalized into anything that might be even the slightest bit disconcerting. Continuing down this line, we will atrophy our ability to create any true solutions and adapt to our surroundings, and that just reads like a bad sci-fi novel.

It is time that we reverse the trend and face the music. Meeting this challenge (market correction) head-on for the truth it teaches us won't be easy. Our "problems" carry a truth - a lesson - in them that is important to capture and which is conveniently stepped over when we get bailed out. Overspending, gluttony, consumption, leveraged credit all are lies, the consequences of which we have to face. And there is always a consequence, you don't get away with anything - even though you think you can. Life does not work that way! This is hard, it is not easy to meet such challenges head on, but bones become brittle and porous if they don't carry a load, muscles weaken and shrink it they aren't exercised, and minds go senile if they aren't sufficiently challenged. The consequences of a bailout may be more severe down the road than those of sticking our faces in the mess and working through the painful process of dealing and adapting. But the result of the latter is nature's way, and life's process of healthy living.