Once my father asked me to move with him to Southern California to “make a million dollars.” “Then what, “ I asked him. His response: “Then we’ll make another million dollars.” “Then what?” I asked again. He did end up making a million dollars, before losing it all and dying broke. I had no doubt at the time that he would make a million dollars. At that time, he had already made a million dollars and lost a million dollars in an entirely different industry. But so what? He was on his second marriage. His kids were all mad at him. He had no friends. If this is what making a million dollars was all about, I didn’t want to have anything to do with it.

Ever since I was a little boy, that was always the goal with my father. He had grown up poor, the child of an alcoholic career Navy man. He left home at an early age to attend the Naval Academy, dropped out his sophomore year, signed a professional baseball contract, quit playing that after a year and then was on his own. He needed a dream in America, and that dream was to make a million dollars in order to find happiness or peace or something like that.

And he did it. But so what? What did he really accomplish? What was the purpose of it all. He’s dead now. I’m glad he was my dad, but he did a lot of stupid things, caused a lot of pain and alienated a lot of people. The answer was always more money. It’s an easy thing to focus on, more money. It doesn’t involve a serious amount of self-examination or broaching of ontological quandaries. The answer is self-evident. Make more money and you win, so just make more money.

And here we are at the exact same crossroads involving our nation. The answer: get more money. Hardly anyone asks where we will get all this “more money,” but much more significant than that, no one at all asks, “What for? What are we trying to accomplish here? What are we going after?” More of the same? Isn’t the “same” what brought us to this miserable crossroads in the first place? Even if this bailout scheme succeeds temporarily and everything sort of resets itself for awhile and we’re sailing along on a sea of profligacy for another five, ten or even fifteen years… Then what? How does it end?

The great wise man of Israel once wrote, “The end of a matter is better than its beginning. And patience is better than pride.” I wonder now, where is the patience when there is so much pride? Why begin again, when there is no plan for an ending? All things end. Does a tree grow to the sky? How is it that we can understand this about a tree, but not about ourselves

Look around at what you are seeing on the news. You are seeing the fruits of a generation of ridiculous attempts at thwarting the natural order of things. Women in the places of men and men in the places of women. And just about everyone you listen to has no reason for doing what they are doing except to just keep everything going the way it has been going. It is not unlike the lung cancer patient who desires only to be cured so he can return to his two-pack a day habit. It is not about finding a fit into reality, but about making reality fit into what a person wants. Everyone should have a house. Everyone should go to college. Everyone should be a millionaire. Everyone should go to heaven.

Nobody should die of cancer. Nobody should starve. Nobody should suffer….ever.

Most of the commentators we hear on the radio and T.V. think we are in a battle to keep the party going. What they fail to realize is that we are in a battle for survival. Like the inexperienced firefighter, admiring the blaze moving towards him… He pulls out a camera to photograph it, not realizing that within minutes it will engulf and kill him. So too are we. Stupid beyond comprehension. Waiting for the commercial break before getting up to put out our own fire in the kitchen.

The United States Dollar cannot survive. If it could, we could just put a million into everyone’s bank account on the planet and make everyone rich. This sounds silly to me. To many people I speak to nowadays, it sounds plausible. How arrogant have we become?

From an economic standpoint, nothing but gold and silver will survive this mess as money. Nothing else will. Some day this will be so plain that people who don’t understand how it happened will be looked upon as idiots. Those same people, the sons and daughters of the idiots who don’t see it now, will already, in some twisted way be building the foundations for their next collapse.

These next few months should be very interesting indeed.

You need not get a property up in the mountains and store up guns. Civilization will not collapse. I know many physicians who are preparing for such an occurrence. It will not happen. Too many Mad Max movies, I’m afraid. I’ve lived in ancient societies, societies without written laws. I lived on land that was passed down for two thousand years through families, without anything written, without laws, without rules. Life will go on here. Things will not be the same, but life will go on. And ironically, life will be better for the next generation. Anything could be better than the ridiculousness I find myself a part of daily now. A ridiculousness where nothing has any value, where my kids basketball league doesn’t keep score anymore and where kids can say, “no” to their coaches and still get to play all “their” minutes. I think things do have value. I am willing to bet everything I have on that belief. Soon enough I will see how right or wrong I am. I’ll hold tight to my gold and silver until then. Bull