In every election cycle, political pundits inevitably cite a now trite quotation from some previous seer: “It’s the economy, stupid!” Is our current national economy good or bad? For the investor class, it is good enough to lift portfolio values to 2020 record levels in anticipation of a further market upturn. For the middle class, it’s an ongoing struggle to regain personal income that matches an inflated cost of living. For those less fortunate, it forces continued erosion of a normal standard of living and increased dependency on benevolence and various forms of assistance from charitable organizations and multiple levels of government. “Through the looking glass” is a distinctively different vision for each segment of the population. The spectrum of longer-term, high-tech, civilization-changing, wealth-creating innovation one extreme and hardscrabble, hand-to-mouth subsistence at the other are theoretically incompatible and unsustainable in our form of democracy. That threat prompts another inevitably repetitive election-year question: “Are you and your family better off today than under the prior administration?” Our collective challenge is to achieve productive economic growth in a domestic and world environment of spreading social and economic chaos - one where widespread needs are thwarted by aggressive political conflict and uneven geographic distribution of natural resources. The envisioned remedy of the post-World War II era - the United Nations - seemingly has degenerated into a symbolic discussion forum unable to reach concurrence and exert influence on fundamental issues of compatible and sustainable coexistence. Must we hope for a humanitarian outcome through the power of prayer rather than politics and warfare? Phil Osifer