Oh  yea, I have been reading the news –it won’t get any better in the next four to five years in the US. As a matter of fact, the world’s top news sources and the market markers on Wall Street predict it will get progressively economically worse each quarter for the next couple years. In today’s measurement of what’s considered “better” by having ones own (as in being the only adult in a house with a keys to your own place) be it an apartment, a home to call your own, money to pay for a car, let alone keeping the job to pay for debt and basics such as food, utilities and childcare, we are going to be losing a lot of what we’ve been used to. I’ve been writing (talking and thinking) about losing it all, as noted in my entry in January. The question is, are we ready to lose it all?  Like Mai said, if we are not, than we’ve lost already.   Losing materials…and basics too.   Well, a lot of us are prepping, because a number of folks in our (people that I know and people that they know) circles have gotten there already.

Let’s note that many communities of color are living in an economic depression, and having that “lifestyle”. The racial breakdown of this economic downturn is pointing at people of color   as those most affected  in unemploymen t.  As more people plunge into poverty in the States, yes millions more will get adversely affected in ways that we can't even imagine.

Well, when looking around me, people I know have lost their jobs, businesses and  homes. Many more, are worried they will be next, so we are paying attention and not grasp the “full depth of our economic abyss” but are close to already living it.

When I'm faced with unemployment, and about to lose the apartment, well I’ll cease paying debt, take the little one out of childcare, because fortunate enough to have the option of living with family (have many family members in L.A.), just make it day to day as food and get by staying healthy and assuring my child with love, and creativity would be my main focus. Have already started talking with others about skill building,  urban gardening, bulk buying, house-sharing, and building/or tag on sustainable infrastructures locally in communities in this city. Looking abroad for what others have done, that we've refused to look at, due to our own way of life.

So, because the New York Times, Democracy Now mind blowing articles on the state of the world not only financially but climately , and everything else around me is yelling economic crisis, and catastrophe, I think it’s time to swing the pendulum to the resiliency of the human spirit while facing adversity. This is when we need to be pulling out the history books and learn more than a thing or two.

Deep breath. This is when community is the only savior. This is when the strength of our ancestors will further solidify our own. This is when the love for something “better” as we redefine better while looking at the rest of the world to measure how we’ve been on the side of exploitation just by the way we’ve lived is the only option. This is when legacy, history, the energy that feeds love, change that we do have, transcends these devastations that every news outlet and those lives abroad that we can’t capture because we live here, yet are getting a taste of it, by joblessness, housing losses, and food shortage – is what will get us through, fiercely.

We are going to be okay. We are going to live differently. Isolation and individualism are not sutainable, even in strong economic times in the US because it has been at the backs of most of the brown world in the South.

Jobs, housing, food – market speculating these basics = failed. . As we begin to enter even more painful terrains – around job losses, losing ones housing, unable to pay for basics – we have to talk, work, and learn a couple things from relational living, local urban gardens, house sharing, squatting, while figuring out what’s the new foundation going to be like for those places we will call home. Engage in discourses as we redefine the way we look at the world, building our contingency plans really with a worldview that considers the world. Let's start talking.

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