Dirty Dancing Change Is Coming

Remember the scene toward the end of "Dirty Dancing," where the fellow who's running the resort turns to his staffer and says something to the effect of, "I can't put my finger on it, but I feel we are coming to the end of an era. Change is coming and there is nothing we can do about it."

One can't help but feel that tomorrow's election - regardless of the outcome - is going to bring that kind of change. Perhaps that's stating the obvious, given that we will have new president after 20 years of Bush & Clinton. But the sense I get is painfully reminiscent of 1976, when Americans said they had had enough of Watergate, Vietnam and presidents they could not trust and admire and wholesale changes were made in Washington. Unfortunately the change was not for the better and the leadership void of the late 1970s created the vacuum that led to the Reagan Revolution of 1980, but we're getting ahead of ourselves here.

Anyone who claims he or she knows where the next few years are going to take us is full of soup. Most likely the people projecting where we are headed are the same people who told us over the summer that oil was headed to $200 a barrel and $5 a gallon gasoline was going to be part of our everyday lives.

I do know this: the banks better get their collective acts together and straighten out the foreclosure mess. If this situation is not resolved soon the four leaders on Mount Rushmore could morph into one and come back to run the country and it would do a lick of good because the economy will be a complete mess.