I was truly amazed when some negative economic news was released this week, and said to be the worst since 2002. Wow! Who would have thought that we would have to go back as far as six years (really 5, since 2008 is so young) to find historical data that is worse. The same holds true far too often when we are discussing everything from how much snow or rain an area has received, how cold or hot a winter or summer has been, how large or small the unemployment numbers are, or how fast the US GDP (Gross Domestic Product) is growing.
Now the planet has been around for billions of years, civilization (at least as we know it) has been around for thousands of years, modern record keeping has been around for hundreds of years and the United States has been around for some 232 years. Is it possible that something should fall outside of the norms for some reasonable period of time before we get excited about it? Should bad news not be only the worst in the last decade before we start running around yelling, "The Sky is Falling"? Are the news weenies so desperate to find something to get excited about that they have to tell us that gas prices are the highest that they have been in six months in order to excite our interest?
Now there are a great many people who understand the perspectives of history far better than I do. (Hell, there are people who understand pretty much everything on the planet far better than I do.) It does not however, take an expert in comparative analysis or a historian to realize that the morons who read the news to us seem to have the historical perspective of a mosquito. In a time in which there are so many things out there that we should be afraid of, I often wish that they would not attempt to announce the end of the world every time that some screwball researcher or little known government agency releases a report showing a number that no one should care about anyway.
I'm just saying...
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