Keeping a smile on your face...

...is starting to feel harder and harder, isn't it? People on the message boards keep talking about stockpiling food and buying guns to protect it...the polar bears are dying...and this is what we've come up with to take over the country when McCain keels over.

I can't imagine this woman sitting down with a cut-throat like Putin. When Katie Couric can make you look like an idiot, then you know you have a big problem.

Ugh, it's all so alarming. You don't know whether to watch the news or just look away and cross your fingers. I remember telling Todd a few years ago that I thought people in the future were going to look back at the 1990's as the last golden times before the fall, and I'm really starting to worry I was right. What does a country do when it's up to its nose in debt, with no money, no skills, nothing to trade, and a corrupt government that couldn't find its rear with both hands and a flashlight?

I think France's solution 200 years ago was the guillotine, but that seems a little extreme.

I try not to worry because that helps nothing, but it's getting me down. I don't want to be living in a dumpster when I'm 80, dreaming about the good old days before we became a Chinese slave colony.

I'm reading this book about Abigail Adams and the scary Revolutionary times when they all thought they might be executed as British traitors if they weren't killed in a battle first, and the terrifying task of putting together a country and a government that just might not make it, and it gives me a little perspective. But she was a person who felt that a country rose on its morality and virtue, and fell on its vices, and I can only imagine what she'd say if she saw where we are today.