Reading it one gets the impression that Michael Lewis (the author of the piece) thinks that we are an amazingly subservient people (no doubt due to 700 years of extended practice under English). Our stoic, almost inanely stubborn acceptance of 'circumstances' has engendered no more reaction than the occasional angry polemic by Fintan O'Toole in the Irish Times and the slow ramming of the front gates of Dail Eireann by an irate Mayo-man.
The purposefully bland, uncountably shameful, overwhelmingly condescending phrase of Brian Cowen - "We are where we are"; seems to have become the main tenet of a grim, bleak faith; one which takes as its liturgy the claim that if we stick this out for four years or so, we will emerge blinking into a new, purified economic light.
We won't.
In relative terms, Japan suffered something much worse back in 1989 when their own property bubble went spectacularly and disastrously 'pop'. (At its dizzying, extravagant high, property in central Tokyo was valued at $1 million dollars per square meter. Yes, per square meter. The Imperial Palace, all 2.86 square miles of it, had a property value greater than the entire market for Californian real estate). Two decades later and the country's public debt is the highest in the world and continues to set all sorts of nightmarish financial records as it continues to inexorably increase. That's twenty years later folks, and still no end in sight.
So no, don't settle for 'where we are'. Be angry, hell, be feckin furious, you have every right to be. Should somebody bearing the letters 'FF' come knocking on your door looking for "d'auld vote", don't set the dogs on them. Rather, invite them in, be pleasant, sit them down, offer to make a cup of tea, and just when they are beginning to relax kick the almighty shite out of them. And then set the dogs on them.
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