I hope I'm wrong, too. But I cannot help but believe that we are looking at the lights of a very big and unfriendly train headed our way, and I've seen nothing to make me believe that civil discourse will be the result. I try to imagine how our people would behave if placed under the circumstances of hyper- inflation, recession, depression, etc... , that faced our grandparents in the '20's and '30's. I try to imagine us all finding our way, as polarized as we are in race, religion, and class, pulling together through a collapse, and find it much easier to imagine the opposite. What's required is a resurrection of Teddy Roosevelt's trust-busting, followed by a reiteration of FDR's New Deal.

The thing is, there is a national project that would revivify the middle class, galvanise our youth, employ our adults, and provide a new national industry, and that would be an Apollo/Manhattan/Marshall Plan-sized effort to reduce global dependence on oil, and to reduce greenhouse gases to a non-suicidal level. But we're not going to get that without a fight from the oil, arms, and banking cartels that are currently pulling the strings. The person who to me at this moment most seems inclined to take on that brutal, zero-sum fight is John Edwards. And of course Kucinich, but Kucinich is just too... original. Regardless, whoever ends up in the White House is facing a tangle of crises that our civilisation has yet to see, and let's hope that the next President doesn't drop the ball, because that ball is our children's future.