Life Begins at 40

Forty is one hell of a number. 60 is the new 40. Yeah, right… tell it to my osteopath! 40% of this nation’s wealth in the last decade came out of financial services! Yeah, right… tell it to the angry global mob that wants to kill all the bankers (as a lawyer not practicing on Wall Street, I finally feel relatively safe… I said “relatively”)… would Shakespeare rewrite his elegant phrase if he lived today? 40% of the world’s small arms are in the United States! Yeah, right… tell it to the Mexican military charged with “containing” the drug lords and their private armies.

Funny how stuff comes back to bite you in the posterior. We arm Islamic militants in Afghanistan in the 1980s to help crush the Soviet Army. The U.S.S.R. collapses, and now we’re battling the same militant group we armed, that same group that flew jets into the Twin Towers, in a seemingly never-ending battle in that same Afghanistan that threatens to collapse Pakistan in the bargain. Blowback.

America gets wildly wealthier than it had ever been by creating and selling a panoply of various forms of financial derivatives that encouraged debt, ignored debt-to-equity ratios, and even had the hubris to find credit-rating agencies who, after being well-paid to provide honest evaluations, rated garbage as gold. Our best and our brightest were lured to Wall Street to partake of the financial excess slop-trough… making things – manufacturing – was not valued anymore. You fudged the line if you “manufactured” software or pharmacological/bio tech stuff. Now our financial success has melted and come full circle to haunt us. Blowback.

Trying to rein in assault weapons, the gangland favorite “arms du jour,” is a battle with the NRA and every conservative who screams for strict and limited construction of the U.S. Constitution, except when it comes to the widest possible interpretation given to the Second Amendment (the right to bear arms). It is more than an occasional event when our police officers are out-gunned as more sophisticated and very-much-more lethal weapons are used on them, often by gang members trained by the U.S. military. Mexican drug lords can make damned sure they can protect their drug routes with weapons easily obtained from U.S. border states and smuggled south across the border… making sure the flood of narcotics can reach all those out-stretched hands in the U.S. Blowback.

Justice? Greed? Stupidity? All of the above? And how are we changing? How will we learn from all of these abundant lessons to make a better world for Americans? Maybe some lessons. We seem to have learned that we have nothing to lose by talking to our enemies, even if we don’t secure immediate miraculous solutions to virulent problems… but diplomacy is a lot cheaper.

Will our best and our brightest be lured into the new technologies that are touted as the saving grace for a nation gone awry… or will Wall Street raise its head to lure the heart and soul of our future, our best educated sons and daughters, back into the world of smoke and mirrors? Will common sense dictate logical interpretation of our laws and constitutional underpinnings, or will extremists define a new America – alone, isolated and with a downward spiral in lifestyle and economic well-being.

I’m Peter Dekom, and guess what I think about every night before I go to sleep?