Wake up call

It's not uncommon for me to have one thought, then have that thought lead to another, which leads to another. It keeps going until soon I'm thinking about something so far removed from the original thought, no one can figure out how I even got there. It usually happens in just a matter of seconds, and it completely baffles Leonard. "How did you ever get there?" he will ask me. Yesterday it happened again, and while I won't bore you with the thought processes that got me there (we started out talking about soggy dog food) I do want to tell you where my mind landed.

I was thinking about the "non-recession" we are in right now and began to wonder what would happen if it gets worse. I'm generally a worst-case-scenario sort of person because if I can make peace with that, I can handle anything. Well, in this case my worst became "What if everything completely falls apart?" I'm talking everything. What if the recession, along with the threat of terrorism, global warming, and American's continuous need to live in excess suddenly causes everything to cave in? What if we no longer knew where our next meal was coming from and had to struggle to find food for ourselves and our children? What if we no longer had electricity, running water, and natural gas available to us? What if the majority of our time and our thoughts had to be devoted to basic survival? Certainly we would think the end of the world must be near. It would be disaster of catastrophic proportion . . . our lives as we know them ripped apart.

Then the thought hit me. There are people all over the world who already live like that. And the really sobering question . . .

Do I have two sets of standards?