Whew! It has been a weird year. The down swing in hope and the expose of crooks with their hands in our pockets who sold us the quick easy snake oil we are prone to be suckers for (make money from real estate and the stock market) has not outstripped the mass illusion of fear that we have been living through since 9-11 and going back in time to the warning of Eisenhower the rise of the military industrial complex (MIC). The BBC series The Power of Nightmares rang true to me. In order to keep the USA going we needed a dream--an illusion--to keep us out of trouble. Hitler knew it, and the leaders of the MIC knew it in spades--sell the snake oil we all gobble up--the snake oil of fear. So we bought it--every last drop of it and we haven't stop imbibing since DDE left the scene more than 50 or so years ago. Fear is the great snake oil that we all look for to justify our needs to be greedy and to look out for numero uno. In spite of this, I hope we have learned one important lesson. The guys at the top (they usally are those with testosterone-stoned brains) are really not any smarter than you when it comes to thinking about the world. We need to practice thinking for ourselves and not looking for the nearest snake-oil remedy to haul us out of the ditches of our own mass illusion that those people "out there" are out there to gitchya. Happy New Year--let's make this one count for all of us.

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