The times they are a changin'

When I first began this blog, in May 2008, I had a hard time finding anyone else out there who was writing about layoffs or the hardships of unemployment. It's hard to believe now. It seems that any day we could wake up and our country will have fallen over some precipice -- a precipice that we can't really anticipate or imagine but that we sense is there anyway. It would be some place from which there would be no return to the comforts of the old days -- i.e., 10 months ago.

Here's the New York Times writing about how many recession blogs have sprung up. Seeing this story in the paper is what got me ruminating on how quickly our economy has nose-dived.

I find that I'm nostalgic. I picked up a copy of "On the Road" by Jack Kerouac last week. I want to drift back in my imagination to the days before I was born. In the 1950s, every expectation was that each generation would out-do the last. We're an immigrant nation, for the most part, and that's what immigrant families do.

But now, the only person I know who has any hope to restore that kind of generational progress is Barack Obama, and he's pretty much paid to appear hopeful. Or he was elected to appear that way. He can't really get up in front of the American public and present any kind of alternative view. He's the optimist-in-chief.