Here we are on the eve of the Fourth of July.

It’s a big holiday for our nation. It doesn’t feel any different to me. It just feels like a Friday.

I’m not a big one for holidays for the most part. Outside of getting together with the family (which of course we will do since it’s time for the annual bar-b-que at Vito’s and Val’s - and “you can’t say no, to a man named Vito”) which is nice, my life just doesn’t have the kind of structure to it where the holidays become that big escape from the drudgery of work (thank God).

I’m in the home stretch on Fat Man, I can’t believe it!

The last few days have blurred together as the ship date gets closer and closer. Managed to finalize the design, do a first setting, do a round of changes, repaginate twice, flow new copy, design the spreads and get everything back to the client to circulate and go out to the proofreader. Today I got all the art I received in. All that’s left is a final round of changes, one page where I haven’t gotten copy, dropping in any missing art, and then just putting together the last nine pages - then it’s done! Yayyyy!



I don’t have a sense of what market is like right now, because I have my blinders on while I’m trying to get this job out the door. I did notice however, the lead story on the evening news tonight was unemployment was at its highest in a decade and that there were 100,000 jobs lost last month. That’s a lot of people out of work (to put it mildly).

It brings to mind a discussion I have been having with more and more frequency not only about the state of the economy within our country but, also about this “ism” we structure our lives around and it’s relevance as a working model for a society.

If that statement seems vague, let me get a little more specific.

Capitalism as we know it, is a relatively recent phenomenon. It’s very easy for us to live in the moment, seeing the way we live today as something that is enduring and unchanging. If you think about it though, as recently as 150 years ago, people lived a radically different lifestyle than the ones we live today. They traveled less, spent most of their lives in one area and in one job. There wasn’t the manufacturing base there is today and people’s labor was very, very different from what our labor today is.

The dollar is the world's reserve currency, which gives us the ability to finance trade deficits that no other country could afford. When an alternative reserve currency appears, the United States will undergo wrenching economic, social and political adjustments.

We may, in our lifetimes, see significant economic, social and political change in our country we could have never imagined as a consequence of our leaders not having the foresight to move our country in the direction it needs to be taken. Technology has removed jobs from the marketplace, it has also resulted in manufacturing jobs being lost overseas as American workers compete on a global (as opposed to national) scale. This downward pressure on wages is creating adversarial workplaces as the American family feels the pressure to stay afloat in the face of rising food, shelter and medical care costs.

Interesting things to take the time to think about on Independence Day.