After a year in which it seemed that the new administration was merely an extension of the old, many people are waiting to see some of the “change” they were promised. Others fear that change, seeing it as moving us down a road to Soviet-style destruction, and therefore, they oppose the initiatives of the new administration.

In my own view, the new administration came in with too many expectations. It was expected that the President would be able to walk on water and to cast out evil & selfish bankers. In fact, the President has worked hard not to offend the banks and insurance companies, a much more moderate approach than his most extreme backers expected. He was expected to put millions of people back to work. It is likely that his ’shovel-ready’ public works programs had the effect of using federal funds to pay for projects that would have been built anyway, with state and local funding. It was expected that he would bring a surge of assistance to the urban areas where low-income minorities have been left out of the productive side of the economy. He has actually been a little preoccupied–it isn’t just White people that sometimes ignore the needs of the inner cities–with other parts of his job. There are other areas such as these, but the point has been made that many Americans thought they voted in the Messiah, and are finding that he is just another man.

This year has barely even started, but I see it being a time when everything we thought was so secure will be exposed as being built upon sand. The idea that the government and its various regulatory bureaus can provide for us and protect us from the cold, cruel world is likely to be shown as false. Back in the 1930s, Herbert Hoover and then Franklin Roosevelt tried interventionist “let’s do something to put people to work” policies. They did not succeed at ending the Depression. Congress tried to reduce oversupply with the Smoot-Hawley tariff act, putting up barriers to a wide variety of imports. The result was predictable: our trading partners retaliated with their own trade restrictions, and the economy sunk even lower. The thing that finally brought an end to the Great Depression was war: World War II, with its nearly unlimited demand for munitions and weaponry.

I’m trying to point out that government intervention isn’t going to save us from this mess. Because this isn’t just a recession or even just a depression. This is a time of transformation, similar to the one we experienced at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. This has been going on underneath the covers for some time, but with the massive job losses and the wholesale nationalization of the auto industry, we can finally see it clearly. The government cannot save us, because the government does not know what is going on, nor does it know what is going to arise to replace the big industrial companies. None of us know what is going to arise.

That is why we’ll face challenges getting the economy started–putting people to work again–as we learn that allocating money for “shovel-ready” public works projects mostly shifts payment responsibility for projects that were already going to be built away from state and local governments (the taxpayers of that area) onto all of us who pay federal taxes. We’ll find that this isn’t just about big make-work programs. This is about the de-industrialization of America, coupled with the export of the high-tech jobs that we thought were going to be the replacement for the manufacturing jobs being lost. America is at a crossroads, and no one seems to know where to go next.

The challenge, then, for you and I, is going to revolve around building and maintaining our small, locally-owned businesses. We need to be the ones who reshape our communities. One way that we can do this is to local-source most of our products, services, and labor. By doing this, we can help our own towns and cities to regenerate some of the jobs that were lost. Now, I have to be clear that you won’t find everything you need in your local community–at least, not if your community is like mine–but you can expand that to cover in-state production or in-country production. Do not forget that not every product produced nearby is sold out of a storefront. Sometimes, you may need to buy online–don’t forget to look for PayPal or Google Checkout instead of giving your financial information directly to every vendor–in order to get goods and services that are being produced relatively close to your homebase.

The econolypse isn’t just about the recession. Your challenges aren’t either. Get ready to face your challenges and do not let yourself be cowed by the howling and noise of the large out-of-area corporations (LOOACs) who are even now lined up to request special favors from the government. You have a job to do, and your town or city is depending on you (even if they don’t know it).