Current events

When I was a child, my grandmother — my father's mother — talked often about the Great Depression. Like a lot of people who lived through it, she held an irrational fear that it would happen again, and soon, and she was constantly on guard against its approach.

She's gone now, but I recall her words as we talk about this trillion-dollar bailout for the finance sector.

The Secretary of the Treasury has proposed we make him a sort of viceroy of the finance sector — sort of like L. Paul Bremer in Iraq, but with more money and undisputed authority.

A plan many find more sensible has come from Senator Chris Dodd. It attaches more strings to the bailout than the Treasury Secretary's plan.

I tend to look at this from three perspectives: first, my general outrage at the way Washington, and for the most part the Republicans, have managed this country since the Reagan era; second, from my personal perspective as an early retiree who has watched his IRA and mutual fund shrink by more than a fourth during the past year; and third, from my perspective as whatever-it-is-I-am spiritually, watching the best-laid plans of movers, shakers and high rollers explode in their faces. And ours.

I don't pay as much attention to politics as I used to, largely because of cynicism. Lobbyists run the show, especially during our current administration, and few people try to pretend otherwise anymore. The voters may get to steer a little bit, but it's like trying to move an ocean liner by pushing on it from the deck of a 20-foot sailboat while the special interests are up in the cabin wining and dining the captain, XO and first mate. And living where I do, I know my vote is usually going to be overwhelmed by the ballots of those whose main concerns will always be using government to force their religious beliefs on others and stopping insurgent incursions into the territory of their own ignorance.

Looking at my shrinking savings, I have to say that it's not so much that those accounts have shrunk as it is that the illusion has vanished and the balances reflect reality instead of the pretend-growth that resulted from viewing thousands of uncollectible mortgages as having value. So it isn't that I've actually lost money, it's that the money wasn't there in the first place. Although if I'd moved those funds into cash, I would have gotten to keep some of that pretend money. I think I'm still okay financially, but I wonder how much worse things will get. I worry that this 'bailout' may be just a raid on the taxpayers and that when it's over, only the banking executives will feel any more secure.

And lastly, I may be given the opportunity to practice non-attachment to financial security. I can tell you it's a lot easier to think about spirituality when you don't have the reality of having to work to pay bills. Fortunately, my needs are more modest than some folks' needs – food on the table, a roof over my head and a place to sit quietly are about it for me.

Also, as a Buddhist I'm supposed to feel compassion for the financial wizards who engineered this catastrophe, but again, I'm having trouble with it.