I remember driving past Motor City, a strip of auto dealerships here, looking at an immense sea of automobiles and trucks and thinking, "Man, they've got to sell and awful lot of cars every day to keep all of that going. Do we really need all those cars?" The answer is, of course, no, but cars are sold less out of need than of want. we want *new.* Some of us get a new car every two years or even more frequently than that. Our entire economy has ballooned into an engines cranking out piles and piles of stuff, things we want but really don't need. The fact is, our economy has been dysfunctional for years, mainly because we as a people, have been so wounded. For so long, we've been stuffing our lives full of this stuff, rather than focusing our hearts on things that truly matter,

The U.S. economy has been living on borrowed time for years. Former President Bush should have sounded the alarm *years* ago, that our economy needs to be re-tooled and redefined. Change takes time, and change is painful. But giving the auto industry billions so they can continue cranking out cars we're not buying makes no sense. There can be no rescue until there is fundamental change about what we think of ourselves and what we see as our priorities.