Tonka Trucks

What's wrong with Christmas this year? Not physically wrong, though it becomes physical. The season is being foreshadowed by global, overbearing happenings which threaten to take the celebration away from us for a long time to come, removing it totally from our hands.

We cannot have this. It is not acceptable. Christmas is a state of mind, an institution, as sure to come as eating ice cream on Saturday with the kids, and watching the sun set with a loved one. It simply must continue on as it's been continuing on for centuries . . . and no financial crisis, or presidential election, or combination thereof should be allowed to get in the way.

So what if we turn on the TV or radio, seemingly every morning, and hear that yet again our retirement fund has tanked and risen . . . and tanked again before the stock market closed the night before? So what if ads for Tonka trucks and Obama-Man - or is that Superman?, and Caribou - ooh, sorry, I mean Malibu - Barbie are being foreshadowed by daily-more-aggravating video campaign promises from both Obama and McCain? So what if We The People don't know if we should laugh, or cry . . . and that's before we get out of bed in the morning?

None of this should be an impediment to Christmas. If I can't buy my grandchild $300 worth of presents he will certainly demolish in less than 3 months (he would've only gotten $100/month out of them), so what? He'll still love me, right, even if I send him a Christmas card with a $10 bill in it? That's all my grandma sent me, and I grew up with no permanent scars. My grandson's at least as tough as I was, isn't he?

I don't mean to downplay the seriousness of what our country-our world-is going through. . . but maybe that's exactly what I mean to do. Everyone else out there is playing Chicken Little and I refuse to take the bait. I won't accept the part.

Exactly what is the stock market? Do your research. The stock market, or more accurately, markets since there are more than one around the world, is not a physical entity with an already-decided future which cannot be altered. The stock market is an ethereal "thing," maybe a bit like the internet in its presence factor-it's real to us but doesn't own an actual physical body. And it is made up of people speculating on where our world will go in the next days, months, years.

Wrap your brains around that, folks. We're creating our own mess by thinking. Maybe we should stop that thinking stuff. It's only getting us into deeper hot water. Imagine if all those speculators started speculating that everything was going up-up-up! Instead of that, "Woe is me, the sky is falling!" mentality, what if each person paid to dream all this up-and those of us who can't keep our fingers off the "buy" and "sell" buttons, wherever they are on our keyboards-stopped for a day and thought about how good it might get . . . rather than how bad it will get.

Greater financial minds than mine (much greater) have pondered this. I'm simplifying the issues but I believe that if we can think ourselves into deeply dire situations, we can certainly think ourselves back up to the top. The Law of Attraction is real, and don't ever believe otherwise. What you think is what you get.

Try to intellectualize (I know, that means more thinking). If you bang your wrist against the side of a desk and knick it, you may end up with a bruise and maybe a small cut. It might be sore. If you look at that cut every fifteen minutes, rubbing your nail over it, you'll irritate it. If you follow that up with continual negative attention, using your nail to pick at the forming scab-a body's natural attempt to heal-you'll impede that healing process, quite possibly infecting what was originally nothing more than a small cut.

We have a choice. We can continue to pick at the abrasion, which is what we've been doing, until it's an infection. This will, and has already, threaten to become so deeply imbedded into our collective body that we ruin our immune system beyond repair.

Or starting right now we can all remember that it is nearly Christmas time. No matter our religion, our belief system, our philosophies. The period surrounding Christmas is a time of birth and re-birth, hope, of looking toward a promising future. If we as a community of human beings slow down and take a collective breath, understanding that we are the ones who drive our economies up, or down . . . we might get enough of us to think upwards.

It's natural, folks, as natural as the sun coming up each day, as natural as loving our children, as natural as sharing greetings with each other on any morning or Christmas cards every year-we get what we ask for. Let's start asking for, and expecting, something better than what we've ordered during recent history.

An added bonus? No matter which party wins the election, they'll go on to do great things for all of us. How can we be sure? Because that's what we'll order. Right?!