Current economic woes

[Mike]

Of course, as the perpetual contrived optimist... When people complain too much about gas prices, like when at work or whatever, I'm quick to put it into context. For the first time in human history, roughly 10,000 years of history properly understood, all manner of people in fourth most populated country in the world are able to travel hundreds of miles without puting much thought into it. If any of us wanted to, really, tomorrow, or two weeks from now, or a month from today, we could drive 500 miles... for no reason. In the anals of human history, prior to just a generation before ours, the average person in the most prosperous country in the world would rarely travel outside his own locality in his life time. Prior to that, only the wealthiest and most affluent people in the Earth could travel anywhere ... and even then, it was a several week or month journey where the odds of you losing your life were relatively high.

I still think it's a major shock to the collective human psyche if such a thing exists..