Now is Now

This is sort of an emergency note. The market has been tanking, you already know that. I'm not going to toss off a bunch of statistics about good and bad days versus the big picture. I'm not going to recap past market moves and compare them to this situation, then draw a conclusion about what will happen because of what happened the last time something similar occurred.
The reason I'm not going to do it is simple. It has no meaning. It's useless, there is no historical predictor. Quit looking for certainty. It isn't there. If it was, then the market wouldn't exist, everything would be a fixed rate. We would all wear grey and there would be no Britney Spears or Paris Hilton. (I didn't say it would be all bad, just monotonous. You can say what you like about Brit and Paris, they're hardly monotonous. Obnoxious, vapid, silly, but not boring.)
The point is not to discuss pop culture. The point is that the market is going to do these things from time to time, act like Britney and melt down. Now is your time to decide how crazy the market makes you. If it's too crazy, then you have too much of your money in it. The market is not going to change to make us happy anymore than Dr. Phil is going to turn Spears into a model of virtue and chastity. Our behavior, like hers,is up to each of us.
Your dilemma, if you have one, is not wanting to sell now, because you've taken this big hit. I empathize, I can't fix it. I'm very much in the same boat. ALL my money is in the market, NONE of it is in CDs, Treasuries or buried in a mattress.
That's me, not you. Take this moment of financial agony and check your monetary temperature, and temperament. If the fever is too high, you found out something you needed to know.
Finally, it's foolish to get an ulcer over money. Try, if you can, to analyze what you think, question it. Portfolio setbacks are a problem if you decide to think they are a problem. Can you question that? Are they really?