Someone was telling me the other day that we brought all this on ourselves. We became fat people driving giant cars into giant houses, encouraged by our leaders to consume and spend and waste like we truly owned the world and owed nothing to no one because we were the chosen people.
We became the living embodiment of the things people in other countries liked to think about us when they wanted to hate us. We grew into the nasty stereotype of the spoiled and ugly American, and now we’re getting what we deserve.
But I didn’t actually do what my friend was accusing us all of doing. I know my kids didn’t. I know most of my friends didn’t. My parents sure didn’t. We all lived relatively modest lives.
I’ll agree that a lot of people became selfish and careless and unthinking, but it wasn’t malicious. I suppose we should all accept some of the blame, but I also believe there are villains, you know, truly evil people who actually deserve to be held responsible.
Oh sure, we ran up our credit cards, but we weren’t concocting dirty financial schemes to get rich at any cost. No. There are real villains out there, and I would like a list of names, so we could all know who to beat up.
I think older people in particular have a right to know who to beat up. Then I think the government should assign special military personnel to beat these people up for us, or to deliver them to us and hold them down while we do the beating up ourselves.
Here’s a particularly annoying article sure to rouse your beat-up-a-banker spirits. It’s in the AARP Bulletin. Let me quote from it at length.
In February, the stock market was down nearly 45 percent from its October 2007 high point, a $7 trillion loss in value—$5 trillion of that loss absorbed by those over 50. Housing values are down 20 percent, with most losses again borne by those over 50. In the past 16 months, the economy has trimmed more than 5 million jobs, and the unemployment rate among workers over 55 has more than doubled to 6.2 percent.
Then there’s the secondary impact—the “rebound effect.” It has three components: Older Americans have less time to recover their lost savings; they’re having to delay retirement; and they’re finding it harder to get rehired if they’ve lost a job, in part because of the difficulty of persuading businesses to hire older workers.
No wonder we’re angry, especially after the huge bonuses paid to creative speculators whose handiwork undermined the global economy, and the trillion-dollar bailouts given to a financial industry whose greed has ravaged retirement savings.
You could say these people stole money from us, but what they really stole was life. Working five more years of your last 20 because some banker needed to make a hundred million a year instead of 50 million is a terrible thing.
Let’s find them. Let’s squeeze it out of them. I want names.
