Bob Crespo

Life is a gift. Be grateful, and don’t soil it or throw it away. You never know when the one who gave it to you will pay you a visit.

It was announced on September 30th that the President and Chief Executive Officer of Bank of America, one Kenneth D. Lewis, was “retiring.” He is 62 years old and looks fit and tanned, as if he could go on for plenty more years of running giant financial institutions into the ground for many millions of dollars per year, but he has been under pressure to resign ever since the Greeding Frenzy of 2008 nearly bankrupted the entire world. He had been the boss-of-all-bosses at BOA since 2001, plenty enough time to either realize that America’s financial institutions were heading toward the edge of a cliff on a runaway train and sounding the alarm and instituting reforms, or sticking his own snout in the trough and swallowing as much slop as he possibly could before it was empty.

Mr. Lewis and a thousand more like him chose to fatten their own ample butts and wallets at the expense of the rest of humanity. At the height of the Greeding Frenzy, Bank of America acquired Merrill Lynch for the bargain basement price of 50 billion dollars and rewarded its outgoing executives with billions in bonuses even though Merrill had lost a lot of money, just like practically every other bank and investment house on the planet. The reasons that this happened are many, and their names are stenciled in gold lettering on the doors to their corner offices in one gleaming skyscraper or another. Greed and larceny emanating from the top down, coupled with slack to nonexistent government regulatory oversight, led to the worst financial collapse since 1929. Five trillion dollars in wealth disappeared and millions of lives were ruined by job losses and the evaporation of life savings, many of them retirees with no time or means to recoup their losses.

Among those who were ruined, conspicuously absent from that list were the fabulously wealthy top executives who caused all the damage. Damned few of them lost their jobs, even when they had to go hat in hand to Uncle Sam to bail out their companies to the tune of trillions of taxpayer dollars. During all this these inept buffoons somehow managed to maintain their arrogant superior airs, as well as awarding themselves huge bonuses for a job poorly done. When they had to appear before Congress to explain exactly how they steered companies that had been astoundingly successful for generations into the ground and nearly ruined the strongest economy in history, their condescending Roman Consul attitude made everyone in America want to slap the patrician grins off their incompetent, greedy faces.

Still heads did not roll. A very few CEOs were forced out with multimillion dollar Golden Parachute severance pay and several were arrested, but for the most part it has been the same cast of shady characters running our economy and handling everybody’s money. They keep telling us that their banks are recovering nicely, thank you, even though the rest of the economy is flat-lining, with unemployment approaching levels not seen in many decades. Countless homes that have been foreclosed upon are sitting abandoned and falling into disrepair while their former owners are living who-knows-where doing who-knows-what to make ends meet. Meanwhile the perpetrators of their misery glide to work in limousines and hop around the globe in private jets, miles and miles above the economic carnage they created.

They blather on and about the magical natural corrective forces of free market capitalism at work as they suck Socialist bailouts from our government to prop up their complete inability to deal with the natural corrective forces of free market capitalism at work. At the same time they criticize the same government who bailed their sorry asses out for trying to help ordinary working Americans get medical coverage for their children. That’s the kind of Socialism they insist is ruining our nation, the kind that is not bestowed upon the super wealthy. The most amazing thing about all this is that the townsfolk haven’t stormed their castles with torches and pitchforks and strung them all up from the nearest tree. At least not yet. Good riddance, Mr. Lewis. Take a few trainloads of your pals along with you, willya? Better yet, all of you go direct to jail, and do not collect another red cent from the community chest.

Love doesn’t care whether or not you are ready to be in love or want to be in love. You have nothing to say in the matter. Might as well just open your heart to the adventure of a lifetime. Win or lose, it will be one hell of a ride.

Life is good, death is bad. That’s pretty much everyone’s take on that whole life and death thing. Not too many people feel the opposite is true, but there are some. They would be the strange. Stranger still when you realize that these lost souls hold that opinion for years and years, yet never act on their convictions and do away with themselves, thus freeing more oxygen and subway seats for the rest of us. Then there are those who feel that death is good for certain other people, a more common brain malady. Again, few of these people act on their beliefs, content to wish those people dead and hope that someone else is enterprising enough and courageous enough to carry out their morbid fantasies for them. There are those willing to do that, murderers, psychopaths and soldiers, but the last group gets a pass on their killing since it is never their idea to fight wars, usually some old fart who’s in charge of them and has serous issues and/or a greedy heart.

That’s the way of the world, filled with the good, the bad and the strange. We are a fierce race of beings, we humans. It’s all about the passion. We love one another fiercely, hate some people fiercely and kill people fiercely. We sometimes even kill for love, as strange as that sounds. It could be a love affair that blows up in someone’s face and twists their mind into thinking that everything will be okay if they kill their rival, the one they love, or both. That’s never worked out for anybody ever but it hasn’t put a stop to that sort of thing. People who are that far gone mentally rarely think these things through. Either that or they think that they will be the exception that proves the rule. At any rate, their handiwork doesn’t get to be called a love crime. A crime of passion, maybe, but there are all kinds of passions swirling around human hearts, not all of them so attractive.

Then there’s the killing done for love of country, like that makes it okay. As recently as 64 years ago, the world wrapped up a war that saw 65 million people being slaughtered over nationalistic passions, with none of the participating nations achieving anything close to the goals they set for themselves at the beginning of the war. Cities of rubble canceling out the labor of centuries, decimated populations, gerrymandered national borders and tense standoffs between hostile nuclear-armed rivals wasn’t exactly the picture in the minds’ eye when the various armies first marched into battle with flags waving, bands playing and maidens blowing kisses at the brave young warriors. God was on their side and they were going to save the world.

After a half dozen years of wholesale slaughter, monumental cruelty and nations laid waste, the hollow eyes of the survivors told a different tale, young men grown old before their time, wasted young women scavenging piles of rubble to feed sickly children and mountains of corpses of innocents joining the millions and millions of fallen soldiers. Didn’t seem so glorious anymore and God was nowhere in sight, possibly off in a corner somewhere cringing in remorse over what His children had done to one another, wondering like any parent where He went wrong when a child does something unspeakable. And who could blame Him? The landscape in 1945 was an abomination of death, hatred and destruction on a scale previously unimaginable.

Logic dictates that then would have been a good time to reassess how different nations deal with one another. It was a time when men and women from all over the world were for the first time exposed to people of many different nationalities, and when the guns weren’t blazing, got to interact with these strange creatures, and more often than not found out that they weren’t so different from themselves after all. They all loved their hometown, Mom’s cooking, their sweethearts and wives, their country and wanted a better future for their children. The letters written from the battlefields to home differed only in the languages in which they were written, not in the content. The letters sent in return were also interchangeable in their messages of love, concern for safety and the sharing of routine news of home, family and neighborhood. The wrinkled snapshots carried by every soldier reinforced the universal experience of being a part of humanity.

So, why was the world at each other’s throats? What could we do to avoid this happening again? Could the United Nations do what nations themselves had been unable to do forever, to live in peace, to deal with one another with tolerance, understanding and good faith? That is what cried out to be done, what all of mankind wanted more than ever before. It was time to put a stop to the killing forever. Not only logic, but people’s hearts demanded this, their souls ached for peace. Some of the conquerors helped rebuild the conquered, hostile dictatorships were turned into peaceful democracies, while others grabbed and enslaved small vulnerable nations and erected an invisible Iron Curtain that would divide former allies for half a century. Logic, goodness and human heartache were losing out to the bad and the strange. The moment had passed for international reconciliation and the world dug in its heels once again waiting for the Third World War.

That never happened, but plenty of other wars filled our spare time, and a hell of a lot of genocide too. So much for learning from our mistakes. And yet the vast majority of people remain loving, earnest and peaceful souls, wanting only to live their lives safe and warm and to give their children a better world than the one they inherited. What’s stopping us? Why do we allow our old men to start wars they will never have to fight? Why do we still bury our idealistic young soldiers in faraway lands? Why do mothers the world over weep for their children and curse the grand parades and colored flags that sent them on yet another misguided crusade?

What is this strange thing inside of us, that barbaric force that overrides our love, our goodness and our finest instincts as human beings? Will there always be within us the good, the bad and the strange? That’s a battle to be fought one heart at a time, perhaps the only war that matters to humanity, the only war that can ever have a good outcome, the war within each of us to do what is right. We already know what is right and what is wrong, that’s not the problem and never was. The problem confronting each of us is to apply that knowledge in every situation we face as a first resort. We already know where our last resort will lead us. We have cried those tears, felt that remorse and swore never again more times than can be counted. Let us swear again and again and again until we get it. Let us wage peace with all the love in our hearts.

Pretending there is no danger can lead to catastrophe, but pretending there is no Wisconsin is harmless enough. Better to go with the No Wisconsin thing if you’re delusional.

When we think of myths and legends we think of bygone ages, when ignorance and superstition was the order of the day. Back in the day, diseases were considered to be the result of “ill humors” best treated by shutting up the afflicted in airless, filthy rooms and treated with appallingly bizarre medicines and potions that gave the sick body one more stiff challenge to overcome on top of whatever disease they had. Sort of explains those average 40-year life spans. In those dark days, people who demonstrated any ability out of the ordinary were considered witches or demons, and they were either burned alive or put on trial by being thrown into a river. If the accused drowned, they were innocent, but if they could swim and survived the ordeal, that proved their guilt and another bonfire was built.

Otherwise reasonable people actually believed this stuff, and a whole lot more ridiculous things, and the powers-that-be at the time, Monarchs and The Church, actively encouraged such ignorance and unreasonable fear, the better to control the masses. And it worked like a charm for untold centuries, although at the expense of human progress. But human progress was of little concern to the wealthy and privileged, who had already progressed light years ahead of their subjects in terms of education, sophistication, nutrition, health, wealth, life spans and general ease of living. They saw no need to change the status quo when they had the whole world at their service.

But, progress happened anyway in spite of their best efforts to stifle it, and in fits and starts humanity has arrived in the modern era, or as least as modern as can be under the circumstances. Those circumstances are the stubborn retention of myths by humanity, invented and illogical beliefs that fly in the face of reality and experience. Just one small example is the notion that homosexuals are homosexual by choice. Well, let’s examine the thinking process that would entail: “Well, I am human and so have free will, at liberty to decide what sort of life I will lead. Hmm… now, which lifestyle choice will be guaranteed to shatter my family, expose me to universal scorn and derision and guarantee that I am stripped of many or the basic human rights enjoyed by everyone else, and pretty much ensure a lifetime of agony, guilt and isolation? I got it! I’ll be gay!”

Has 5% of humanity come up with the same solution? Seems excessive and quite dubious. Of course that is nothing but a myth, and a ridiculous one at that, yet one as persistent and the belief in demons and witches. Science and medicine is certain that homosexuality is as much a choice as being freckled, tall or left-handed, in other words, in-born. Then again, physical and medical scientists in the Middle Ages struggled against the popular notions that the earth was the center of the universe and that the plague was God’s punishment of the wicked. Inch by tedious inch, eyes were opened and myths debunked, only to be replaced by new myths. Take that whole American Dream myth where anybody can grow up to become president. Thankfully that is not the case, otherwise there would be more family-connected idiots like Bush the Younger and fewer remarkable men like Abraham Lincoln.

Yes, but what about the other part of the American Dream, the part where anyone can get rich? In some cases that are few and far between, that is true and America has many famous people who went from rags to riches, their stories being so popular because they were so singular. For the most part, the rich stay rich, the poor stay poor and the middle stays somewhere in the middle. And the rich fight every instance of social progress introduced as a threat to their monopoly on being rich, from fair pay for a day’s work to Women’s Suffrage to Social Security to Civil Rights to Universal Heath Care, and in all cases seek to enflame the middle classes that these thing are a threat to them as well.

An the middle classes have accommodated them admirably like serfs hopping to their masters’ service, even though the top 1% of Americans possesses more wealth than the bottom 95% of all Americans combined. That 95% includes the entire middle class, precious few of whom will ever join the 1% ruling elite, the ownership class. Any who support legislation that would benefit any but the 1% are derided as Socialists, which has somehow become a curse word in this nation, on a par with “witch” or “demon.” Which is odd, because almost every wealthy person is the beneficiary of socialist programs, from tax breaks and write-offs to direct subsidies for their corporations, or in the form of phony “farm subsidies,” where they agree not to grow alfalfa on their tennis courts and horse paddocks for a hefty annual stipend.

The rest of America has to make do with what they earn in salary, money-wise, but there are many socialist programs from which we all benefit, and not just Social Security and Medicare. There are the sidewalks that line our streets, for one thing. We didn’t have to build them, the government did. There are the Police and Fire departments and Boards of Education in every locale that operate at no charge to the citizenry. Then there is the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines and Coast Guard who defend us and fight our wars, and none of them gets to send out a monthly bill like the Cable TV company. Our interstate highways can be used by anyone for free, even demons and witches, er, that is… Socialists.

Our so-called Capitalist System is riddled with Socialism, which is just fine with the capitalists so long as they are the greatest beneficiaries of governmental largesse. The corporate welfare system in this nation dwarfs the payments and benefits given needy individuals. And the poorest recipients of welfare and social benefits are subject to far greater regulation than our wealthy corporations, who want it both ways, having both an unregulated free market and a steady flow of Socialist subsidies. This corporate socialism has created a vast pyramid scheme where those at the top remain there and those occupying the various layers beneath this 1% of Americans pretty much stay put as well, with minimal flow upward and downward within the lower 95%. And the recent tax cuts handed to this 1% by Shotgun Dick Cheney and Bush The Younger only cemented their position at the top by transferring trillions of dollars from the middle classes in the middle of the pyramid to those at the pinnacle.

So, the myth being propagated by the wealthy and shouted from rooftops by their Pavlovian Minions of the Middle Class that President Obama is an evil Socialist is very curious, especially in the light of his making huge Socialist payments to the financial industry to save them from collapsing under their own greed. When he proposes a Socialist program like Universal Heath Care for every American, only then is his Socialism deemed to be evil and anti-American. You’d think they would have waited a decent interval between their free money payments and their anti-Obama campaign. Talk about biting the hand, eh? And a lot of people are lining up to drink that Kool Aid, a great many of whom have benefitted by the Socialist programs of Unemployment Insurance, Social Security and Medicare, to say nothing of the government-provided smooth streets and sidewalks where they hold their rallies.

It is a sight to warm the heart of the 1% in the penthouses high atop the “Capitalist Pyramid.” Well, if Socialism is good for the capitalists (and it has been very, very good), let’s have a little more for the rest of us, even if the rich and the corporations have to start paying their fair share of taxes again. And if the average net worth of the top 1% dips below 10 or 20 million apiece, well, they can always start saving their soda cans for the nickel deposit and cutting coupons from the Sunday papers like everyone else. Just don’t let them make up the difference from our struggling hides anymore, as they have been doing for a long, long time. So much for the myth of Free Market Capitalism.

Why the chicken crossed the road is nobody’s business but the chicken’s. Who cares anyway? The burning question is – what came first, the chicken or the egg, and the chicken’s not talking. Mysteries abound.

Never ask hypochondriacs how they’re feeling. They just might tell you and that’s going to be one long conversation, and very one-sided at that. There’s a lot of questions we’d be better off not asking. Curious beings that we are, we’re relentless with the questions, and that’s mostly a good thing, and leads to a whole lot of discovery and enlightenment. Like our teachers told us, if you don’t know, ask, and you shall learn. Pretty sound advice on the face of it, but its companion adage, “there are no stupid questions,” flies in the face of human experience. There are lots of stupid questions, a plethora of things we just should never ask. Consider these:

“Is that thing loaded?” Rarely is there a good outcome when this question is asked.

“What does this button do?” See above, and whatever you do, don’t press that button.

“What’s your problem?” Unless you’re a doctor addressing a patient, there’s no possible good answer for that one. Similarly: “What’s wrong with you?”

“What did they put in this delicious sausage?” Shut up and eat. There are some things you do not want to know.

“Why does Jesus want gay people to die and rich ones to pay no taxes?” Depending upon who you ask, you could start a riot, initiate a convoluted argument with an ignorant buffoon or make Glen Beck cry again.

“Who’s got the best college football team this year?” Depending on who you ask, you could start a riot, initiate a convoluted argument with an ignorant buffoon or make all the sportscasters cry again.

“Why don’t corporations recruit the salesmen who talk young men in the prime of their lives into blowing themselves up?” Actually, that’s a good question. Those guys could sell snow shovels in Brazil. Sales Rep of the year? It’s Mullah Jihad again!

“If a tree falls in the forest and there’s nobody there to hear it, will it still squash Bambi like a bug?” Yes. Yes it will.

“Wanna see the scar from my operation?” No, most definitely not.

“Have you had that looked at?” Before asking this question, make sure the person actually has something wrong with them an isn’t just plain old ugly. That could be pretty awkward.

“What if I don’t want to take my shoes off?” If you ask this in an airport, the next question will involve how you feel about a full body cavity search.

“What’s under that kilt?” Well, what the hell do you think is under that kilt?

“What could be the harm in it?” Whatever it is you ask this one about, rest assured there will be a great deal of harm in it.

“Is that your natural hair color?” The next two things you’ll wonder about is if that bright red complexion is her natural skin tone and how someone who weighs 115 pounds can pack such a wallop.

“Do think that paint is still wet?” Only one way to find out, isn’t there?

“How long before Afghanistan becomes a stable democracy?” That would be when someone invents a time machine that can transport entire nations from The Dark Ages to the present, or maybe when Barack Obama’s great-great grandson is conferring with his generals on how many soldiers, tanks and warplanes it’s going to take to convince Afghanis we are their BFF.

“Why haven’t you joined Twitter yet?” This question is yet one more annoying  message from slackers with too much time on their hands and the misconception that everyone wants to know the blow-by-blow details of their tedious lives.

“Are you going to finish that?” Yes, I am planning on finishing that, now that you mention it. That was the whole idea when I ordered it. Thanks for asking, though.

“Why didn’t I think of that?” Because someone else did.

“Want to see the latest pictures of my dog?” Unless your dog is posing with the Playmate of The Month, expect a negative reply.

“Guess what?” Nobody feels like guessing what’s on your mind. Spit it out.

“Does this outfit make me look fat?” Well, since you brought it up…

“Why me?” It’s got to be somebody. Why not you?

“Is that a Susquehanna Hat?” Anyone even slightly familiar with Abbott & Costello can tell you this is one question you don’t want to ask or answer.

The book “How To Win Friends and Influence People” has no chapter about making people feel lousy. That approach generally wins enemies and alienates people. Outside of a church, no one likes to be angrily berated. For arrogant know-it-alls, your best shot at success is preaching the Word of God According to You. Better than nothing, but not that much.

Now we’re talking! Eyesight is being restored to the blind! As part of an experimental pilot program by the National Eye Institute, 37 people have had partial eyesight restored to them via corneal implants. With varying degrees of clarity, people who could not see can now distinguish shapes, shadows, light, people and in some cases large lettering. While still in its early stages, the results have been nothing short of miraculous to the people formerly inhabiting a black world. Recent leaps in miniature electronics, gene therapy, artificial corneas with camera eyeglasses and medical science are bringing to fruition the ultimate Holy Grail of medical science. How cool is that?

Which leads one to wonder what else we can do. Apparently making cars that get decent mileage is more complex than restoring sight to the blind or putting a man on the moon like we did 40 years ago, so you get sort of confused by the mixed results on the science front. While it’s been very obvious that the amazing computer and communication advances have transformed the world dramatically in recent years, the medical field seems to be particularly adept at adapting the new technologies.

Consider those afflicted with serious heart conditions, which 30 years ago routinely killed people at a young age or condemned them to taking it very easy lest they drop dead from the slightest exertion. These days injured hearts are repaired in routine bypass operations, valves are being replaced and weak hearts made strong again so that even people who have had major heart attacks can live long and productive lives. Amputees can also look forward to an amazing new generation of prosthetic limbs that will respond to brain impulses like a living limb, also thanks to electronic miniaturization being adapted to living tissue.

There’s a lot of great work going on. Now if they could cure cancer, diabetes, AIDS and malaria. But who knows, technology is making such rapid leaps that those cures may come soon enough to save many people suffering today. Cancer survivability is better than it was 5 years ago, and researchers are finally seeing the light at the end of the tunnel as far as figuring out just how the hell AIDS works, the first step to finding out how to cure it. There are already drugs available to help HIV infected patients live normal lives and avoid developing full-blown AIDS, so that disease is no longer an automatic death sentence.

The industrious and successful medical researchers make you wonder what’s up with other branches of science, especially in the field of energy, an increasingly critical issue for humanity. We’ve known that oil is a finite and polluting resource for generations already, but so far we’re still setting greasy stuff on fire to propel us from place to place, sending ever more noxious fumes into the air we all breathe. The suspicion is that the energy scientists are counting on their more talented counterparts in medical research to come up with a cure for emphysema so we can keep burning stuff until there’s nothing left to burn and then they’ll figure something out.

Apparently the United States Government agrees with that strategy. When addressing mandatory gas mileage for cars, the best they could do is demanding that automobiles get 35 miles per gallon, 7 years from now! There’s already cars that get that mileage right now, just not all that many of them. And that’s not even a very impressive figure in a world where the demand for petroleum is growing swiftly and the earth isn’t making any more of it, at least not for a few hundred million more years when enough of us rot into a greasy black goo. Most experts agree that we just don’t have that kind of time.

As far as funding a broad and compelling search for alternatives to internal combustion? Not a huge priority. Maybe the jugglers and clowns that pass for our legislators forgot that we are the nation that put a guy on the moon when most of them were still in grammar school. Perhaps too many of them would sorely miss the bribes, vacations, campaign donations and expensive gifts from the oil and auto industry lobbies. Or just maybe they forgot that the leap to the moon was commissioned by the government. They called it The Apollo Project, made it a huge priority and assembled the requisite scientists, technicians and aviators into a well-funded and intelligently coordinated effort that produced the desired results of landing a man on the moon and them some.

The “then some ” byproducts of the race to the moon was the cornucopia of miniaturized electronics, fiber optics and silicon chips that fueled the rapid development of incredible computer devices and ushered in the Information Age. Imagine using these fruits of the Apollo Project to form a New Apollo Initiative to search for new sources of energy? Just as in the original Apollo, there’s no telling what other incredibly beneficial technologies might emerge from this effort. The inventions made possible and real by that monumental effort were at the time considered impossible, just as many people today consider clean and plentiful energy an impossible goal. Hell, we have people restoring eyesight to the blind right here and right now! Don’t tell us what’s impossible anymore. Men on the moon, eyesight to the blind. We have made miracles. We can make more.