Your link in the Money Chain?

You probably learned about the Food Chain in sixth grade. It goes like this:
Tree draws nutrients from soil.
Beetle eats woody parts of Tree.
Bird eats Beetle.
Cat eats bird.
Wolf eats cat.
Wolf dies, decays to soil.
Tree draws nutrients from soil.
Its the food chain, a linked succession of life-sustaining events that stretches back to the dawn of time.
What about the money chain? Have you heard of that?
It goes like this:
Wheat draws nutrients from soil.
Farmer harvests wheat.
Farmer sells wheat to Mill.
Mill converts wheat into flour (value added), sells flour to bakery.
Bakery makes doughnut (value added to product), sells it to girl.
Girl takes doughnut (service added) to man stranded in his car in traffic; girl reaps generous tip.

This really happened. The girl's name is Stacy; the time was 1973; the man was in a long gas-station line because of the OPEC-generated fuel shortage; the Donut was a Dunkin', and I heard about this on All Things Considered.

The sequence of events illustrates the money chain.
Money is circulating every day among people everywhere. Its what people do. Some folks have a little extra, maybe enough to make an impulse purchase--like a doughnut--purchased merely because some energetic 7-year-old, gently guided by her father, provides the go-get-'em service while hungry people are stuck in a gas line.

Like I said, this really happened. During the gas shortage of 1973, a guy (thousands of people, actually) was waiting in his car in a long line of cars, to buy gas. Seven-year-old Stacy positioned herself in a parking lot where she could strategically approach the stranded motorists. It was an improvised opportunity borne of a a child's courage, her father's wise resourcefulness, a potential buyer's appetite relative immobility. young Stacy converted the circumstance into a profitable activity.

Stacy was thinking out of the box. Although the drivers' vehicles were motionless or crawling, the girl's neurons were firing on all cylinders, devising a way to make lemonade, as it were, out of a lemony situation.
Ventures like hers have made the USA the prosperous country that it is today.

Oh yes, we are still prosperous, relative to most the of people who live on this developing planet. We are still prosperous, even if many of us are stuck in the right place at the wrong time, or in the wrong place at the right time, or just stuck in the employment line, maybe a line like the one you'll see cast in bronze at the Roosevelt Memorial across the lake from the Jefferson Memorial in Washington.

What about you? Have you explored the money stream to see if there's a little liquidity stream pooling up in your environs where you might gather a few buckets of cash? Or some other resource. Have you checked it out? Have you opened your eyes, as Stacy did, to the possibilities for increase right around the corner from you, or a few exits down the beltway, a few stops away on the subway.
Or are you just waiting for something to land in your lap? Expecting a phone call from Employment Security? Listening for a knock on the door from the union boys?
Don't hold your breath; look around. You may find a silver lining in those clouds.

Its the American way, and the only way we'll ever get out of this mess, because I hate to tell ya, Virginia, but there ain't jobs out there for everybody. Some of us are going to have to spring out for the promised land. Better get busy and find something to do. You might be the next Bill Gates, or Oprah.