If you think the summer is dragging on a bit too long, you’re right. This year, Labor Day doesn’t come until Sept. 7, and only last year, in 2014, it came on Sept. 1. So we’re having virtually a full extra week of summer right now. Just when we thought summer was all we wanted, we’re getting a little anxious for the new school year and the fall political season to commence, already!

Needless to say, there is a lot on our collective Little City plate for the next few months. There is the deliberation process that will restart on some new large-scale mixed-use projects that are queuing up – Mason Row, the Hitt corner of downtown, the big one on the new 34 acres of City land and some others. There is the start of the new school year and the politics that some will try to make on the issue of enrollment numbers, as well as the fate of the Mt. Daniel Elementary School renovation and expansion now at the mercy of the Fairfax County Planning Commission. There is the fall election, and the campaigns that have been gearing up low key all summer and will burst out into the open with five candidates seeking three City Council seats and eight seeking three School Board seats.

When the dust clears on these, it will be in time for the procession of yet another annual budget cycle with issues of tax rates and quality of services and schools again taking the spotlight at least through April 2016.

But it may be that overarching factors may once again impinge on our Little City efforts to keep the good stuff on a roll here. The stock market is displaying the same exacerbated wobbling behavior – huge drops followed by huge gains and back again – that preceded its huge dive of 2008 when it went from 14,000 to 6,000. This may worsen as the Fed can’t hold on much longer with its decade-long federal stimulus policy of zero interest rates in the face of deflationary pressures it can no longer contain.

As China blows its cork, we’re all made witnesses to the hopelessly interconnected global world economy and the U.S.’s particularly vulnerable association with the destiny of China. While America’s military industrial complex rages to subvert President Obama’s resistance to relaunching war in the Middle East, domestic and international U.S. covert psy-ops campaigns escalate terror and racial conflicts and back radical right-wingers tasked with wresting Ukraine away from Russia.

The second wave of the Second Great Depression is now ready to take center stage on this heating up, little spinning orb to unleash war, death, chaos and disease on a wider scale than ever yet seen.

Many may be hoping that the Pope’s visit to America later this month will mark a way out of all this. If so, more power to him, whether he stops in Falls Church or not.