One Giant Roller Coaster

I have been listening to a lot of late 80’s and early 90’s music lately. Most of it is the stuff that I listened to in Jr. High and the beginning of High School. One of these fine tracks on the JPod is by Bauhaus (yeah, remember them?). I was being very amused by the reference in the song to “West Germany.” Remember the Berlin Wall? Remember East and West Germany? Then I started thinking about how much crap has happened in the last couple of decades. How domestic public morale has basically been flipped on its head. I remember the tough times of Reaganomics. And how it seemed like the world was turning over a new leaf when the Berlin Wall came down. I thought that all of the eastern bloc nation states would join hands with the western world and skip off into a field of daisies at any moment. The economy was booming again. Gasoline flowed like honey. There was the first war in Iraq, but at least most of the western world was on the band wagon. I feel like we have come full circle, in terms of morale, back to the cold war era. The economy sucks. We just broke the 4000 casualty threshold in Iraq, on Easter Sunday. I read the article in the Times yesterday that included snipits from some of writings of fallen soldiers. I’m sure that proponents of the war would tell me, that is what I get for reading a liberal leftist periodical. To that I say, I read the same leftist periodical during the other gulf war, and all through college, and it never made me despair the way that it does now. There is overwhelming skepticism and distrust toward the government, and those vying for the presidential title. The entire world hates our guts. It is kind of a bummer. Sometimes I wish I could go back to the days of watching the Berlin Wall coming down.