Nervous

SO, I can't help but be extremely nervous, realizing that no matter how we slice it, the Fannie/Freddie disaster impacts our country in ways no one can fully realize. The impact is huge to mortgages, to financial markets, to the taxpayers, to the entire economy.

In reading blogs, opinions, and news stories today, Jim Kunstler stands out:
There's a particular moment known to all Baby Boomers when Wile E. Coyote, in a rapture of over-reaching, has run past the edge of the mesa and, still licking his chops and rubbing his front paws in anticipation of fricasseed roadrunner, discovers that he is suspended in thin air by nothing more than momentum. Grin becomes chagrin. He turns a nauseating shade of green, and drops, whistling, back to earth thousands of feet below, with a distant, dismal, barely audible thud at the end of his journey. We are Wile E. Coyote Nation.
Is there anyone in the known universe who thinks that the US financial system is not fifty feet beyond the edge of the mesa of credibility?

But I look around at my neighbors and my friends and although I know people are feeling the pinch of higher gas prices, I don't think anyone recognizes the impact the banking collapse is having. Or the impact on the dollar that a government bailout leads to. People seem to think food and oil and housing will recover within a year or two.

And I feel like a raving lunatic to keep harping on the need for canned food, gardens, and self-sufficiency. Stark raving. I hope I'm wrong. But I'm buying more rice. . .