I was thinking about the history of this country the other day. My thoughts were that we are at the beinning of a new century, the 21st century and I was reflecting on where we were at the beginning of the 20th century. This period totally does not reflect that one. At the beginning of the 20th Century, we were coming off of the excesses of the Gilded age-- with classes that possessed extreme wealth while the proletariat slaved away in the mills and factories, while industrialization carved out new modes of living for the petit-bourgeois farming classes who moved into the cities and became the urban poor. The U.S. economy was relatively stable and living was at least simple, relatively. At the beginning of the 21st Century, the U.S. economy is headed into decline, the old empire has risen and is now about to fall. The age of America is in collapse. While at the turn of the 20th century, there were economic changes that altered people's lives. At present, we are witnessing a period of destablization which will not only change people's lives, but result in a complete overhaul of the way of life that the people of this country have grown to expect, especially since the 1950s.