McDonald's and Vienna

I've been a bit morose lately (and the chorus says, when is he ever really not morose) - the economy has been much on my mind lately. Fuel prices have been the highest thought - I happen to have gas receipts going back to February 2 of this year, when I paid $3.06 a gallon. I just saw tonight that the "cheap" gas in town is $4.16. This now means that my daily commute is running me $16.00 a day, or $80.00 a week, or $320.00 a month.

The bad part is, I've taken just enough economics to know that any economy is actually a fairly fragile thing, based on feeling as much as fact - and generally limited to the least input. Right now, that input is fuel. The global economy, in some form or fashion, is built on fuel - from "Just In Time" manufacturing to the fact that virtually every product I buy, whether food or oil or books, is shipped from somewhere else. Fuel prices will affect everything - including, eventually, employment.

So to assist The Ravishing Mrs. TB tonight (as she was having an in-home spa party), I took Na Clann out to dinner tonight - McDonald's, a treat. As we sat outside in the play area, the girls running around, I was overlooking one of the main roads into town watching the cars go east and west as I picked through the remains of dinner. It suddenly hit me, in the slowly setting sun, that given all factors being the same, this was a thing and vision that was doomed to perish - and the system which built it as well. And not in the time frame of my life, but much, much sooner. It reminded me of being in Vienna in July of 1914, just prior to the start of World War I, when the feeling was the 800 year old Hapsburg Empire would last forever - that the civilized and elegant life that Vienna represented at the time would go on forever, unassailed by the world outside.

The image haunts me ever now, as I sit down to write about it. What does one do at the end of the world - or at least the world you knew?