The peaceful garden masks the violent challenges of aging in this society. I don't want to grow old. Who does? Somehow, I seemed to be handling it more gracefully until recently when a series of personal setbacks struck me down.
Like most people, I can't look at my "retirement" accounts without pulling my hair out. Where did all that mutual fund investment go? Why was it supposedly a safe channel for somebody like me? Come again?
If I weren't inherently such a saver, as opposed to a spender; and an avoider of credit, as opposed to a plasticaholic; I'd just be every Joe who can default on his house and seek personal bankruptcy, etc., and then "start over."
But I started saving whatever extra money I could in my 20s. A life full of emergencies, tragedies, opportunities and excitements required most of this money for one purpose or another, often involving my children's best interests.
Luckily I had it to spend much of the time.
But now, at another stage of life, the greediest, least regulated part of our society -- Wall Street -- has corruptly and callously traded all of my "retirement" away. Assholes. I read that those crooks who work in the financial industry are back to their hateful ways, earning over $500,000 on average (not counting their bonuses), trading derivatives and sustaining hedge funds again.
In other words, these creeps are back to doing the precise things that got us into this mess, this recession.
Unless the Obama administration wakes up and imposes tough new sanctions on the people at fault for this economic disaster, it will soon spiral downward into something much worse -- a depression.
While the mad dogs of the right scream about "socialism," the fat cats are quietly rebuilding their monstrous Ponzi schemes that collectively will make Bernie Madoff look like a sandbox player.
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