Your scope of referance seems to be smaller then most.
You said, “Most Americans are really feeling the pinch from our economy and have lost their homes.” This just isn’t so. In fact it is completely false and not even close to being in touch with reality. Some have lost their homes and that is never good but that certianlyisn’t new. 97% of Americans who have mortages are paying them on time. Somewhere around 33% of all homes in the U.S. are owned out right, no debt what so ever. Your comments/view appear to be take through the leans of a telescope observing the most limited area. Michigan has had it’s guts ripped out but that horse left the barn in the 80″s and 90’s and will never return home. Thank you weak management and strong unions…

The economy in the U.S. is struggling and the high price of gas does sting but that just means one part of our economy is doing well, the energy industry. When oil was $10 - $25 per barrel all through the nineties, that sector was getting killed, not record profites but record losses. The commodities sector was getting killed. Every steel company was either in chapter 11 or very nearly there. Today they are all making record profits. The farmers are making tremendous profits as all commodity guys are.

Five years ago we couldn’t compete with the world as their manufacturing costs, due to labor and raw materials, was much lower then ours, remember? We today we are exporting commodities and manufactured goods as we have become the low cost producer. This is due to the weakness in our dollar. The flip side of that is the weak $ makes things we purchase over seas more costly, like oil. Oil is traded in u.s. dollars per barrel. Today a barrel goes for $133 per. The dollar is trading at $1.55 eruo’s or something close to that. Five years ago or so the Euro was .9 or so, that’s a reduction of 72% for the dollar against the Euro. That mean the price of a barrel of oil is 72% higher just base on the Euro currency exchange. The $133 barrel of oil today in 2003 dollars is about $72 per barrel. That would be $2.00 gas or something like that. That explaination is very crude and simplistic but in the ball park.

So I’d ask you, which do you want the stronger dollar or the weaker one?

Back to my origanal point it seems you need to widen your leans as difficult as that may be. Reading between the lines, Iraq isn’t the root of all our problems and neither is the poor job the Bush admisitration did in some areas, including the management of the war.

Always a pleasure to read your thoughtful comments.

I agree that we tend to look at the world through our own context and miss much of human misery which we sometimes cause. We don’t understand why there is resistence to our occupation in Iraq. Our President lectures leaders in the Arab world on the moral superiority of democracy and then uses and solemn opportunity in Israel for a political dirty trick.

It is a tangled web that we are currently weaving.

Hopefully we will have new leadership in November that can actually walk the talk of loving our neighbor as ourselves.

Jeff

As far as your article about scope, I’ve often see the correlation between a person’s views based on their scope of the world. Most of our scopes are so tiny that it’s a wonder we don’t succumb to our own personal pity parties. Because to broaden our scope, and have empathy for others relieves us from most of our woes. For instance, most Americans are really feeling the pinch from our economy and have lost their homes. It’s a sad situation. But broaden that scope to encompass the entire world, and the pity party becomes a celebration for not being born in a hut in Africa somewhere with flies all over us from birth until death at the ripe age of 3 or 4.

Another timely scenario about scope is relative to Americans and voting for a candidate based on one issue relative to our own personal needs like “I don’t want my guns taken away.” Never mind that over 4,000 soldiers have died in Iraq, the economy is down the tubes, and we are in debt in the trillions, that person will vote for his/her gun. Thanks for thinking of the rest of us. We need to broaden our scopes in America to at least include our fellow Americans. As Christians we must include everyone and everything in our world when we contemplate anything at all. It puts things into perspective as they should be so that we never become too self absorbed or self righteous. If everyone would just think about the other guy for a change, we would all have someone to cover for us like a chain reaction.