State of the Union? Not so good

I was casually taking my semi-annual stock of the nation the other day in which I closely examine various societal components and gauge their progress, or a lack, thereof, when compared to past
activity — specifically home values, unemployment, gas prices, stocks, and business and personal bankruptcies — and I have come up with a rather unsettling conclusion. I’ll try not to scare anyone
needlessly, but the emerging message is quite clear. Let me put it in purely scientific terms:

Everything is broken! There is no end in sight!

Still, we have each other. To be fair, I should add a positive addendum to my findings that will give all of us “glass-half-full folks” some small measure of comfort. The movies are not broken. Yes, they are
increasingly expensive and often crowded. But they are as good as ever. Even better. And I could be wrong, but even the popcorn may be improving. (Well, at $5 a bag, one would hope so.) But everything
else in America is definitely broken.

This downer news, of course, only applies to certain types of people among us, and we know who we are — namely home owners and apartment renters, real estate agents, anyone with 401K’s or other
savings based on the stock market. Also, small business owners, large business owners, people who work for small or large business owners, people who do not work, people who actually do something
useful for a living (unlike columnists and other malcontents), and drivers and vehicle owners also are included.

We also must include couples with kids who (for a variety of reasons) will never get full scholarships to expensive four-year colleges, as well as senior citizens living on fixed pensions that would be well
off if it was still 1978. And add to the mix all those venture capitalists and entrepreneurs out there who were silly enough to believe those financial “experts” on TV when they emphatically proclaimed a few
months ago that the worst was over. Surprise!

In fact, out of today’s 310, 430, 725 living Americans, there are only two people not directly affected by the sad state of nation. One guy is the retiring Bill Gates, who is so well off that when he
sometimes loses hundreds of millions of dollars on Wall Street he’s not even aware of it until he gets his next bank statement in the mail. The other lucky one is Angelina Jolie, who has the uncanny
ability to elicit tons of daily publicity for her worthy charitable work in the third world with hubby Brad, while at the same time earning millions in movies that are so bloody and mean-spirited that those
same children cannot buy a ticket to see her. (Save the children, but keep them away from the theater.)

The only other person who may not be adversely affected (at least financially) by today’s dastardly state of the union is George Bush, the legendary oilman from Texas and not-so-legendary president of
the United States. His immediate solution to $4-a-gallon gas is to start drilling for more oil ASAP. How’s that for learning our lesson about oil dependency? Then again, he’s not paying for his own gas
these days anyway. But let’s make it a point to check back with him a year from now and see how much it costs to drive from one end of his Texas ranch to the other.

It’s troublesome, to be sure, that even those dire alternatives we could always count on when things were really bad (and for most of us that was never), can’t be relied on today. “You could always sell
your house” used to be the battle cry of the desperate. Today you can’t sell your house unless you settle on an asking price that you wouldn’t have sold your car for a year ago! And your 401K just lost
more money in a month than you could probably live on in a year. And that drive down to grandma’s this summer? Isn’t it just about time grandma got her license back and drove up here instead for once?
I mean, 97 isn’t that old!

Is this a great country or what? Someday we may be able to live in it again.

John Merli has been a Potomac News columnist since 1985. E-mail him at j.merli@comcast.net.