I’ve learned some invaluable lessons within the last three months of my life. Some of them sound very simple, and even very obvious, but they didn’t click for me until I began to learn them first-hand.
The one on my mind right now is: Life is hard.
We live in a culture of putting-off-the-inevitable. It doesn’t matter where you look, or what problem you’re talking about. If there’s a problem, we’ve invented a way to fool ourselves into thinking that we don’t have to deal with it, and we pull it off masterfully, while managing never to learn from our mistakes.
Two examples come to mind, and the first is a bit personal. Through a recent breakup with a girl whom I had convinced myself I was destined to be with, I’ve felt real pain for the first time in my life. Throughout my life, until this point, there has always been a “fix” for my problems. I’ve trained myself to look for the easy way out. But this time, no such exit exists. Not a day has passed yet in which I haven’t, at least briefly, felt an intense sadness over what was, as it turned out, not to be. I’ve often awoken suddenly in the middle of the night feeling alone and depressed, knowing there’s nothing I can do to make myself feel any better. It has felt like an emotional roller coaster - sometimes I feel okay, sometimes I even feel good and completely forget for a moment, and other times I feel so indescribably horrible that suicide starts to seem appealing.
Faced with the reality that there is nothing I can do or say to anyone that will relieve the pain — and trust me, I’ve tried — I’ve been tempted to resort to other quick fixes. For every feeling of pain that can only heal with time, there will always be someone offering a quick and “painless” fix that inevitably delays the pain and often creates a far worse situation. In a college town, where doctors prescribe some of the most potent and addictive drugs known to man as a solution to the common cold, drugs like Xanax and Klonopin are available free-of-charge to anyone with more than three or four friends, and at first seem to offer an easy escape. Of course, popping benzos every time I feel like shit is probably the single dumbest thing I could do as it would almost inevitably leave me psychologically and physically dependant and would guarantee that I’d have to deal with an unthinkably-horrible withdrawal stage in addition to the problem I would have been running away from in the first place. Thankfully, I have more than a few very incredible people in my life who have been through this before and were caring enough to share with me the wisdom that the only sane way to survive feelings like this is to recognize that life is hard, that the feelings will pass with time, and that I should get on with life. Once I get through this, I will be a much better, much strong individual than I was before I was in the relationship in the first place. Never the less, that a small number of my peers seem to think popping pills is a reasonable solution to getting through the rough time I’m having made me think very critically about the world around me.
However, it wasn’t until I read Lew Rockwell’s article today that I made the connection between what’s going on in my life and what’s going on in the rest of the country. This brings me to my second example. Here we are in a world in which our entire economy is built on a system designed to allow us to escape reality. For the unaware, the US Dollar is printed by an entity called The Federal Reserve. The sole purpose of this organization is to attempt to manipulate the laws of economics by transferring wealth from the average citizen to, well, wherever they think they should put it. This is called inflation. They create new money and cause the money that you and I work for to be worth less. The idea is that by taking the value of our money and handing it over to select groups of companies, the country will grow faster and disaster can be avoided. These guys honestly think they’ve conquered the laws of nature. The result of this activity is very real. Recent examples are the dot-com boom and even more recently, the real estate boom. As soon as reality sets in and people start to realize things aren’t right, a bust begins to occur, and the Fed rushes to stave off reality. Instead of ceasing the behaviour that caused the problem, they fight harder against the well-established laws of economics and make things worse by further inflating the money supply. This does delay disaster, but only makes matters worse in the long-run. Market corrections can be painful for everyone, especially when they’ve been manipulated so heavily for so long, but the economy cannot heal until they occur.
Make no mistake: The Fed cutting rates when they know there’s a problem is directly akin to a drug addict reacting to the onset of withdrawal by switching to higher doses of harder drugs, instead of suffering through the withdrawal so he can be free of his addiction.
Just as popping benzos is the obvious temporary way out of dealing with the intense pain I’ve felt, the President’s reaction of freezing interest rates is just a temporary way out of dealing with a market correction. All of this just makes things much worse, and the people who suffer and are you and me. Food prices go up, gas prices go up, prices on imported goods go up, and it seems like money gets tighter for everyone in America, but people don’t realize why. This is the result of the Federal Reserve making our money worth less.
We must, as a nation, recognize this problem. This is why Ron Paul’s candidacy is so important to me. He is the only one running for president who is trying to explain this to people, and until more people listen to him we will continue racing towards disaster.
