Across the Great Racial Divide:

It is with Occamistic logic and vision lex parsimoniae that we, as a nation, understand people, places and things. With Aurelian simplicity, we determine cause of a given event sans extraneous factors.

When up to one year ago, leading Economist declared a Recession. The fourth estate's equivocal lexica suggested everything was either rebounding or dismal depending, of course, on which side of the political fence one sits.

Due to a certain milestone going unreached, a suggestion regarding an economic recessional period seemed overly pessimistic. Those seated across the aisle suggested that, already reaching the real indicator, we were in a recessional state.

Thus, we sat as a confused nation with very little grasp of economic indicators while at the mercy of the fourth estate also known as the keepers of Truth. Fortunately, they were there and, with their grand beneficence, told us what to think.

January 20, 2009, heralded as a quasi-second coming by many people; a date, after which, a nation will heal and our recovery will begin. In our simplicity, we place causation on one single entity, the Bush Administration. We cast aside centuries of economic theory, new age principles of a global market economy and complexities contained therein. No more Bush becomes the mantra of a nation.

Poincare's theory, later morphed into Chaos Theory, suggests that minor events over time become exponentially immense. So too is the state of our nation's economy. Bailouts of lenders and automakers are measures to slow the precipitous decline of an ailing economy.

Over the upcoming year, we shall witness hardships unlike any we have seen in several generations. Certain events within both the global and national economies have occurred over recent months and years. The negative impact of which will go, unfelt, for several months.

To fix the nation's economy, it requires years if not decades. On January 21, 2009, we will not awaken to a Utopian nation. We will find former Bush backers pointing fingers, while former Bush bashers will defend the new administration.

It does not take one person to destroy a nation's economy just as it takes more than one person to recover an economy. We, as a nation, must come together and participate in this recovery effort. We must educate ourselves and sacrifice our naïveté, sacrifice our innocence.