The sad thing about this photo isn’t the unemployed people. It’s not even the factory or the town going downhill.
The sad thing about this photo is the guys who wrote the sign were basically telling the world, “We are such bad businessmen, such unimaginative people, that even if someone came up to us who could take $5 and turn it into $10, we are so busy dying that we can’t talk to that person.”
That’s an incredible, and embarrassing, lack of faith in yourself.
For 20 years, we, the United States, have been playing consumer to the world. Now we, and much of the world, are paying the price. What got us here won’t get us where we want to go next, and it will take us a while to figure out what that next is going to look like. In the meantime, we get to have a recession.
The spirit that caused those people to write that sign, I see a lot of that spirit going around these days. It’s the spirit of, “We are so busy dying we don’t have time to live.”
Find that spirit within yourself, and root it out like there’s no tomorrow. You owe it to yourself, and you owe it to your country.