With the economic news debilitating and our Presidential appointees backstroking; with trillions of dollars in deficits resulting in trillions of dollars in cash on the sidelines; with unemployment rising and profits tumbling faster than Rod Blogoyevich’s reputation, the nation is scared.

My question is where is this great nation’s anger?

Other than the anger expressed by those who believe that it is the government’s responsibility to guarantee them the right to own a home or continue working for a failed business, I do not see much anger and have seen absolutely NO resolve to take the necessary steps to dig our way out of this hole.

I have been asking that question in a series of seminars. It is one thing to rail against the fates; it is quite another to accept responsibility for the problems.

Make no mistake. We collectively are to blame for the problems that ail us.

What? How can that be? How did we create Bear Stearns failure; or Fanny and Freddie or the sub-prime deal? It was those bums on Wall Street and George W. Bush and his cronies. It was Bernie Madoff and it was Ken Thompson. How dare you say that we are to blame for their collective excess?

Well, I can…and we did.

All of you who accepted an adjustable re-fi at 125% of your equity are to blame; those of you who bought a house with a no-doc loan are to blame; those of you who re-elected a Congress with a 9% approval rating because they took care of your narrow self interests are to blame.

During 1973 and 1974 there was a shortage of gasoline due to the Arab oil embargo. I vividly remember two hours in a gas line waiting for the precious stuff and not caring what I had to pay to get it. There was an outpouring of outrage that insisted we mend our ways and reduce our dependence on foreign oil. The Cadillac’s that stretched for blocks; you know, the ones with the big tail fins; they had to go. These gas guzzlers were at the root of the gas shortage and we demanded fuel efficient cars….for something like half of a second.

Then something amazing happened…gas prices backed off, other problems surfaced, and we collectively wiped the slate clean and forgot all about what can happen when oil prices go through the roof.

As oil got to ten bucks per barrel over the next thirty-five years, all of a sudden, we ABSOLUTELY had to have a Hummer or an SUV to ferry the kids around. Shopping for fuel efficiency became as faux pas as a Jeremiah Wright sermon. After all, we could afford it; heck, we even deserved it.

So, all of you screaming at last summer’s prices that approached five bucks a gallon go look in a mirror (or better yet, the driveway). Nine months ago, T. Boone Pickens was on every radio and television show in America talking about the Pickens Plan which featured a reliance on wind power that would replace the nation’s dependence on gas. In nine short months, gas went from five bucks to under two bucks, and when is the last time you cared about what Boone Pickens had to say? And, does anyone remember the juice that the rebel congress gave McCain during their Drill for Oil love in? Anyone…Anyone?

I have seen the enemy, folks, and it is us. All of us, collectively; and that is all of the bad news.

Now, what are we going to do about it? Because, we can fix this you know? All it takes is the collective outrage of the American people to stand strong and insist (for longer than half of a second) that we get on the straight and narrow, but it cannot be a relative process. You cannot say that Wall Street must do this and the banks must do that and the car companies must do something else.

No, we have to alter our own behavior.

We have to demand more of ourselves, our elected figures, our business leaders. In short, we have to be accountable to each other with no mitigation via moral rationale. There has to be an absolute truth woven throughout the fabric of our behavior that unequivocally says what is acceptable. Until we get there; until we get mad enough to insist upon that behavior; we cannot hope to maintain a truly free market…and we’ll slip further into this abyss where we find it A-OK to ask the government to artificially prop up what they have no business going near.

Optimist that I am, I still believe that we will.

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