Bears, wanting to be God, goodbye St Patrick, pandemic, mayhem, drinking the bitters and will the last one out please turn off the lights…

“Don’t Panic.”
Douglas Adams,
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“Pan again!” said Dr. Bull irritably.
“You seem to think Pan is everything.”
“So he is,” said the Professor, “in Greek.
He means everything.”
“Don’t forget,” said the Secretary, looking down,
“that he also means Panic.”
G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare

(ABC News)

Bears and Bulls.

If you’re not hiding under a rock, of which I suspect many of us just might be doing during
these precarious days…but if you’re not under a rock, then you have most certainly heard
the dire alarm bells sounding…

Our stock market, the global markets, has/have all taken a downward turn.

Make that more like a free for all free fall…

Thank you very much Covid-19.

Wall Street has heard of your unrelenting spreading nature and turned
itself into a bear market practically overnight.

A bear market is not what we want.
A bear market drops like a rock.

A bull market, on the other hand, is good for our investments, our 401K’s,
our retirement savings…

According to thebalance.com, the average length of a bear market is 367 days.
Conventional wisdom says it usually lasts 18 months.
Between 1900 and 2008, bear markets occurred 32 times with an average duration of 367 days.
They happened once every three years.

Yet as my dad would always say…the market has to always correct itself…
it’s an ebb and flow sort of rhythm.
Ups and downs will each come and go..having their own day in the sun.

Personally, I like rhythm…
on the other hand, I don’t like getting pushed off a cliff and falling with no parachute.

But this was coming from a man who survived Prohibition, the Depression, a World war,
a Police action as a reservist and that infamous Summer of Love…while trying to shield
my eyes.

He was stoic in the face of panic.
Hence that Greatest Generation…

But then he could also be quite the Eeyore.
So who’s to say…

Amid all the Henny penny, the sky is falling mayhem taking place, there is still
news taking place.

I caught a recent little hissy fit offered by our favorite congressional darling, AOC.
That favorite fab four member—

It seems as if AOC became riled up because people were being just oh so racist and bigoted
for not going to Chinese restaurants due to fears over Covid19, aka coronavirus.

Think Wuhan.

Yeah…
I don’t think we’re any more likely to “catch” the virus by eating Chinese food than we
are if we eat Italian food…
but try telling a panicked populace…try telling them that its ok to eat Chinese,
Italian, Korean, Iranian foods…
Panic does not “do” reason.

AOC doesn’t get the notion of a panicked populace.
She wants to control the populace.
The populace is to bow to her commnad.
That’s what socialists want to do.
They control.
She doesn’t get panic.
You can’t control panic.
A politician can’t be God.
Despite their desire.

And if you think a Saint can beat covid19, try telling all the St. Patrick revelers.
Savannah, Georgia—one of our Nation’s largest St. Patrick day celebrations,
has canceled it’s St.Patrick’s Day celebration over the Covid19 pandemic.

Yep, pandemic.

The globally scary word of Bubonic Plague…
Get ready to slap the bells around the necks of the infected.

When was a pandemic used a political weapon?
Today.
As in NOW.

What better way can a defeated party defeat a booming president that they hate?

So yes, the stock market will plummet, our economy will slow and the panic will rise.

Icelandic volcanoes have come and gone, hampering global travel.
Terrorists have hampered global travel.
Now Covid19 hampers global travel.

This too will pass.

Our sporting events are being canceled.
Our large gatherings and celebrations are being canceled.
Schools are shuttering their doors.
Our normally free and carefree lives are suddenly being impeded…
Americans don’t like being impeded.
We are a nation of coming and going as we please.

Yet reality is what it is…

The real question is…will Americans come together as one Nation or will
she remain as a divided dual nation?

In the meantime, I’m finding that the consuming of bitters is both medicinal as well
as most applicable…for these are indeed bitter days…
despite the fact these bitters come from Italy…

(the Drink Shop)

Oh, and will the last person to leave to wherever it is we are either leaving or going…be that
a mandated or self-imposed quarantine, please turn out the lights….

But now thus says the Lord,
he who created you, O Jacob,
he who formed you, O Israel:
“Fear not, for I have redeemed you;
I have called you by name, you are mine.
When you pass through the waters, I will be with you;
and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you;
when you walk through fire you shall not be burned,
and the flame shall not consume you.
Isaiah 43:1-2

Smallest of the small

Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.
C. S. Lewis

(a tiny shriveled seckel pear / Julie Cook / 2014)

Christmas.
Is that Christmas with a big C or a little c?
Depends on who’s asking and who’s telling.

If it happens to be those special interest groups wishing to do away with any and all Christian religious attachment to the word, then if so, it’s merely just a time of year we offer a “winter break” which happens to have a huge helping of buying, spending and giving thrown in just for good measure.
It’s a time of “winning one for the economy” you know.
So therefore it must be the commercial Christmas of the consumer driven economy, right?
What with all that Black Fridays, Cyber Mondays and SALE, SALE, SALES. . .
As economists, financial folks and marketing giants are either ho ho hoing or bah bah humbugging all the way to Wall Street.

Is that Christmas with all the trimmings?
The Christmas of the glitz and the glamor and the Hollywoodesque productions?
The thousands of trees–real and fake, the miles and miles of lights all woven, strung and assembled in Communist China. . .you know the place, the country where there is no religion but the leader. . . The stockings hung waiting for baubles and cash as the boughs are all decked by folks who began this show known as Christmas as early as October, bypassing tricks and treats plus the joining of a Thankful Nation all in order to be the biggest and the brightest because that’s what we’re all about in this country, bigger and brighter.

Or is it the Christmas of the tiny and the small?
The less and not the more.
The forgotten and the overlooked.
The soft and not the garish.
The time of quiet reflection.
The time of recalling, recollecting and remembering.
The time of arrivals and not for massive departures.
The time for a wee tiny babe to be born in a dung filled, hay scattered stall in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere Judea–not to a rich and famous, big named, trendsetting mover and shaker couple, but rather to a poor, overlooked, hungry Jewish couple just trying to do the best they can by their soon to be born child?

A Christmas when it is a mere baby who brings hope and salvation as opposed to the more obvious big, loud, showy and ultra powerful.
A Christmas when we witness the God of the Universe, the Creator of all that was, that is and that which will be, descend upon a withering, riling and agonizing planet–coming in the form of pure innocence and vulnerability—-reminding us all that indeed there are great and powerful things found in the smallest of the small.