Well, the financial bailout plan is certainly working, lol. The Dow Jones is down another 251 points right now. How is this effecting you and your family? We took all of our money out of the market two years ago. I wish I could say that I was just so smart that I saw this coming -- but alas... that's not the case.

What actually happened was, about two years ago, I got really sick and had to stop working. We went from a two income family to a one income family -- literally overnight... and, at the time, I was making more money than my DH. As a result, we slowly drained every last drop of our savings.

Looking on the bright side, that was money we planned to use as a down payment to buy our house with -- and just before I got sick I had us approved on a $520,000 mortgage to buy the townhouse we were already living in. But a little voice inside my head told me not to trust anyone who would loan me that much money.

So, here we are now -- still renting, and we lost our savings anyways... but for reasons that we chose. And that is what feels good. Of course, I didn't choose to get sick -- but these things happen. At least we had a savings account to get us through those hard times.

Isn't having choices great? I mean, what is a choice anyways? It's a freedom. And freedom, I'm afraid, is becoming a thing of the past.

How much freedom do we really have when our foods are covered in poisonous chemicals, our milk is loaded with harmful chemicals, and the news we read is, at best, spun to favor one of the two political parties running for office right now. That's not news. It's propaganda.

When I was a teenager, my quite strict parents would tell me again and again that the things I loved (like music, dance classes, and hanging out with my friends) were NOT my right -- they were freedoms that I earned through responsible behavior (like being on the honor roll).

Maybe this is what is wrong with America. We expect so much and we don't want to earn it.

It's not easy to find out the truth these days. You have to want to know what is really going on in the world. You can't believe what you see on TV, or what you read in the paper, or what you see online. The corporations who bring you the news are owned by the same people who sold mortgages to people who can't afford them.

Now, I'm not blaming the consumer -- imo, the mortgage crisis was caused by predatory lending and a multi-trillion dollar insurance scam that went unregulated because they didn't call it "insurance" ... and my husband I just about went for the bait. However, I do think that what we are all missing is responsibility. This financial crisis is Wall Street's fault for being greedy AND it is Main Street's fault for drinking the cool aid.

By not acting responsibility we are loosing our freedom -- just like I often lost my freedoms as a teenager as consequences for acting irresponsibly. The difference is, we're letting our own government take away our freedoms. We tolerate the Patriot Act because somewhere deep down we think we need it. We don't.

What we need is to take responsibility for our own actions. We need to want it. It's not easy -- it means that we have to DO MORE than come home from work exhausted and flop on the couch. It means we have to do more with our kids than send them to school in the morning with a few bucks in their pocket for lunch and expect them to come home educated. WE have to do the work. We haven't been doing it. What we've been doing is paying our government to do it for us... to think for us.

I just want to shout from a mountaintop, "WAKE UP!!! WAKE UP!!! WAKE UP!!!"

If you haven't been to the CM group, Ripples, I really really really encourage you to make it your next stop. There are a lot of really bright mamas over there with a lot of good information -- information that, in our country has become hard to find. Hang with that a minute. In our country, it has become difficult to get accurate info on current events.

I'll end this rant with a video. The mamas in Ripples had a great idea for spreading the word -- put this video in your CM journal. It's part 3 in a 5 part series you can watch for free on YouTube. It should be mandatory viewing to get a driver's licence or register to vote.

Tags: politics, propaganda, news, current events, tv, television, government, election, financial, crisis, mortgage, money, family, freedom

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