The flow from Deep Horizon has been stemmed. A yellow cap that looks like it means business has been installed over the gushing oil pipe.

Deep Horizon isn’t out of the woods yet, though.

“The sealing cap system never before has been deployed at these depths or under these conditions, and its efficiency and ability to contain the oil and gas cannot be assured,” according to a news release from BP.

Assurances are hard to come by in the troubled economic waters that are battering our economy. Falling prices hint at deflation.

“Such outright wage declines hint at deflation, a generalized drop in wages and prices. The last time that happened in the United States: 1931-1933, when prices fell at an average annual rate of more than 8 percent,” according to USA Today.

Other signs that things aren’t going well is the legislation Congress is pushing through.

“Congress on Thursday passed the stiffest restrictions on the banks and Wall Street since the Great Depression,: according to The Associated Press.

Congress is so worried about our nations money they are hearkening back to depression tactics — a time when the dollar was burned for warmth.

Rep. Ron Paul, time and again, beats his pulpit on the Senate floor, preaching how our monetary system that utilizes the Federal Reserve to create money from debt cannot last. His cries that our nation cannot afford to sustain its current wars — much less venture into new ones — fall on deaf ears.

Momentum is something this country fails to understand. The way we keep telling ourselves that we’ll let the America of tomorrow take care of things only allows inertia to continue to carry us in the wrong direction.

What if we are heading to a kind of event horizon? A point of no return where we can no longer backpedal out of recession, and instead head for collapse.

The oil spill is the perfect example of how “we’ll let the America of tomorrow deal with it” types of thinking leads to disaster.

We obviously were in no way ready for that kind of catastrophe. It’s not that it wasn’t feasible to plan ahead, we just didn’t want to think about the possible future implications of our actions.

Deep Horizon showed us that tomorrow becomes today very quickly. We can either address looming problems with planning and real change today, or they can address us tomorrow on their own accord. How they get our attention will be much less pleasant than the work we could do to change things today.

Rome wasn’t built in a day, nor was it put asunder in one.

Real changes need to be made in how our nation does things: how we think about war; how the economy works; how we utilize the Federal Reserve; the way we use energy and how we harvest it; and stopping our nation’s move to be a colonial power in the world.

Until we are willing to take responsibility now for changing our direction and work laboriously toward that end, things will not get better.