Monday, Crazy Monday

I well remember Black Monday in October 1987: I was about a year out of grad school and was working for a pharma company, driving around San Diego listening to the radio as the stock market crashed by a huge percentage and the US attacked Iranian oil derricks in the Persian Gulf. To my young ears, it felt as if the world were ending.

Almost exactly 21 years later, the stock market cratered yesterday. You know why. And there's so much blame to go around that collectively all of us don't have enough fingers. Republican, Democrat, Bush, Clinton, Wall Street, WaMu, etc., etc.--all of these idiots are at fault for allowing America's financial markets to run along unchecked and create havoc for average Americans, havoc that the average American simply doesn't deserve and did little to merit.

I hope the havoc is small on your end of things. Although I am unscathed, none of us know how this will ripple or crash through the economy and our politics. Let's hope whatever goes on is fairly short-lived and that the market bounces back as strongly as it did after 1987 and 2001.

All of that is a long way of saying that the usual mental health news on this site is a bit inconsequential right now (and did yesterday's financial news ever drive down this site's traffic). We'll see where things are at later today. But right now I recognize that there are other things that are more important than what I usually write about.